Web Hosting
Audience: Small Business Owners
Purpose: An overview of web hosting
Author: Jonathan Bailey — © Bailey & Hall 2006 Article Date: 2006-09-14
Last Updated: 2007-02-27
Introduction | Working With Your Web Developer
Hosting Options & Prices | Summary
Introduction
In general, if you do not already have a web host then you should work closely with your web developer when choosing one. Be sure to discuss all of your internet requirements whether you feel they are relevant to the website or not. Email for example is often co-hosted with your website. If you already had email addresses set up and then picked a web host you might suddenly find yourself unable to access your email.
Working With Your Web Developer
Unless you operate a website with a great many users and/or complex applications you should leave the choice of web hosting up to your web developer. There are several reasons for this.
First, your web developer will have a certain skill set when it comes to programming and will need to choose a host that supports their abilities. For very simple sites this might not matter but it can sometimes be hard to tell for sure what is simple.
Second, your web developer might have a preferred provider. If they are going to continue to maintain the website then their relationship with hosting tech support could be invaluable one day. Also, it is unlikely they would choose a provider for their clients that had frequent outages and issues.
Finally, the choice of web hosting is best left until after the developer has reviewed your requirements and made a recommendation. Together you will determine your needs in terms of storage, bandwidth, database access, programming features etc. Then you can select a host that suits your specific needs.
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