(Some postings on this site may be sponsored)
Whether you are an experienced, novice, professional, or hobbyist web developer we all have one thread in common: web hosting.
Even the world’s best web site, web application, or web log (‘blog) doesn’t matter in the slightest if it’s not hosting where others can find it.
Even for the experienced professional web developer, finding a hosting solution can be a daunting task. Reliability of the provider’s customer support, hardware, network infrastructure, and backbone connectivity/redundancy rank near the top of the list when searching for a reliable host. After all, you don’t want you “next-big-thing” idea to constantly go on- and off-line due to traffic coming to a site that’s on the same box (or even the same network) as yours, right?
The next set of requirements are often placed before the first set: hosting type. Is your site going to run on a Linux server, running Apache, MySql, and PHP; or are you more of an IIS6, MS SQL 2005, ASP.NET kind of developer?
Next, how much power do you need behind your site? How much data traffic? What kind of administration tools?
Find a reliable host first, then find out what their offerings are, and what their costs are for the muscle that you’ll need… and make sure you can easily upgrade — possibly on a moment’s notice.
That’s a lot of stuff to look for! Luckily, there are web sites out there that serve that particular purpose. The one I’d like to mention by name is webhostinginformation.net/. While they’re not the end-all, definitive source, they are an EXCELLENT starting point and are platform agnostic.
Happy coding!
