Hosting for your website: where do you get it?

Web Hosting

What is Web Hosting?

Once your various web pages have been built, they have to be stored on a computer with a permanent connection to the internet that will make your pages available when requested. This is the web server or web host.

Web Servers generally run either Apache on Linux operating system or IIS on a Windows operating system. The technical details are not significant to most customers. Windows based hosting often has a higher cost, so we recommend and provide Linux based hosting, as do the majority of web hosting providers.

Hosting can be arranged relatively quickly, usually in a matter of hours. However, your website may not be available to the whole of the internet for anything up to 3 days. The delay is caused by the need to replicate the location of your website to the rest of the internet.

If you’re happy with your current host, that’s fine. Stay with them. If you aren’t, we can recommend 2 hosting companies we are currently using for our own domains. In alphabetical order, they are Aussiehost & GDWebhosting.

What’s it going to cost and what do I get?

Prices will vary from time to time, but customers with typical requirements (no more than 20 pages with some graphics and moderate traffic levels), are currently paying $120 – $180 per year for hosting.

Generally the only the options you are likely to use are:

  • create / delete up to 5 email accounts
  • forward emails to your email account at your ISP
  • check out the bandwidth your site uses
  • view visitor statistics for previous months

You also have the knowledge that as we are using the same hosting as you, then it is in our interests to have any problem rectified ASAP.

I only need Email hosting – what’s it going to cost and what do I get?

This option is usually taken up by anyone who wants to look professional, yet doesn’t have the need for a full-blown website. It may be there is a need to get started printing business cards & letterhead while deciding how/when to build the website. We would recommend you invest the extra $50-$100 per year to have a one page “about us” website (not much more than your logo, a couple of paragraphs of text and your contact details). There will always be someone who loses your business card, but because they can remember your website name, contact details can be found.

Is all hosting the same?

I’ve already mentioned differences like the hosting software and the operating system. This shouldn’t impact seriously on what you need to meet your requirements. Be aware that typically Windows based hosting can be more expensive.

There are three major differences between hosting companies:

  • Price: expensive doesn’t prove quality
  • Reliability: most should state they deliver at least 99.9% uptime. That 0.1% represents 13 minutes every day when the server might be unavailable, so any lower is really unacceptable.
  • Location: if you are targeting the Australian market exclusively, your hosting should be in Australia.

If you need more information about anything on this page, why don’t you contact us.