Being Mr. Kenny

Now that I’ve been doing websites for a while, I’ve got a little bit of experience in using services provided by web hosting companies.

Firstly, if you’re just starting out, you need to know that there are two things you need to buy to get your own website: a domain name and hosting. A domain name is a name like “beingmrkenny.co.uk”, or “open-space.org.uk”, and is basically a shortcut to where your pages are hosted (i.e. the computer that actually stores your pages).

It’s a good idea to buy these from separate companies, since you can get save a lot of money doing it that way.

Hosting

In my opinion, when you’re buying hosting, there are six things you need to bear in mind:

1. Diskspace and bandwidth — Get the right amount of diskspace for your project. Bandwidth is the amount of data you transfer. So, if you have a 2MB video file, and it gets downloaded 20 times, the bandwidth used = 2MB × 20 = 40MB. The things that take up diskspace and bandwidth are large files like multimedia and photos. If you expect to have lots of those, and high traffic, go for more diskspace and bandwidth.

   To give you some sort of guide, my website uses 300 MB diskspace and 600 MB a month bandwidth, after nearly two years of being up and running.

2. PHP and MySQL — PHP is a server-side scripting language. That means that, instead of sending a plain HTML file, a page is put together on the server before it’s sent to the user, very useful if you need different a different page for different requests.

   MySQL is a type of database. If you want to have a blog, you’ll probably need at least one MySQL database. If you plan to have other things (like photo galleries or guestbooks) you might need one for each of these things, but check first.

3. CPanel — CPanel is a comprehensive, powerful control panel for configuring your website. It’s better than other control panels or admin areas I’ve come across, and now I find it indispensable.
4. AWStats — AWStats is a powerful statistics package for your website. It returns all sorts of information, including search phrases, browsers and their versions, duration and amount of visits, countries — and more. It’s a million times better than Webalizer, another stats package used by a lot of hosts.
5. Support — Good tech support is actually quite important, but unfortunately, the only way to check this before purchase is with existing customers who are often too hasty to praise. However, if the majority of the customers are happy, it’s probably OK.
6. Reliability — Downtime is a real pain and can result in search engine penalties if you’re down for long periods of time and frequently. You can check this by doing a search for customer reviews for a particular hosting company — there are quite a few review sites which are independent of hosts. Some hosts also provide a “service status” page which can show when and for how long there have been outages.

It’s often worth paying annually rather than monthly, since you can often save money that way.

Registering a domain

With hosting you need to look for quality. When you’re registering a domain name, however, there’s not a lot that can go wrong, so cheapest is best. When you register a domain, all you’re doing is saying “I want example.com and I want it to point to this hosting”. Since domain names are held with an independent organisation (in the UK it’s called Nominet) all the registrar needs to do it tell it what your domain is, and where it should point to, and that’s pretty much it.

If you’re charged more than about £3 a year for a .uk domain name, you’re being ripped off. Other domains (such as .com, .net) are more expensive, since these are global, not tied to a particular nation. (Also, buying a domain from a foreign country, like .fr, .es can also be more expensive if you’re not actually based in that country.)

Hosting companies/Domain registrars I have known

• Names.co.uk — do not bother with these people. They were the first company I used, and they provide poor hosting (no PHP, no MySQL, not much diskspace, poor admin area and stats) for the same price as other companies which provide much better service. Also, they charged me £19.99 for two years’ domain name registration, which is totally absurd. They are very definately overpriced for what they provide.
• Dataflame.co.uk — much, much better. The hosting packages they provide are excellent, and they are they provide the most reliable hosting I’ve ever used. There are also a variety of hosting plans to suit most needs.
• 34sp.com — great, budget-friendly host if you’re just starting out and want something basic. I run a small site with them, and I’ve had 2 instances where the site has been down (in the last 6 months) but it was rectified within a day. Good basic packages, very good tech support, but basic stats and control panel. Ideal for a low-power personal site.
• 1&1 — the cheapest .uk domains on the net at the moment (£1.99 a year, excl. VAT). The only company I use to register my domains.

Please note, the links above for DataFlame and 1&1 are my affiliate links (as in, I get paid if you sign up for hosting with them after clicking that link). That said, I wouldn’t recommend them if I didn’t think they were reliable, good hosts. BTW, while it shouldn’t be a criticial factor in your decision, a good affiliate scheme is something else to look out for in hosting. If enough people sign up through you, the affiliate scheme can pay your hosting fees!