As I continue progressing through my personal and group projects I often wonder if the work we are doing could ever go live and possibly make ourselves any money. As of the moment we use the school's web hosting people account provided to hosting for our temp pages. Since the beginning of the semester I have wondered how to go about getting a site hosted myself and have learned several things to look for when choosing a host.
Many of the hosts free and pay will provide the majority of the services you will need like FTP support and the ability to use PHP, MySQL, SQL-lite and Email Services. Web storage can often be purchased additionally or grow incrementally through increased ad space allocated on your site.
Often pay sites will offer an excess of tools for your benefit, and the free sites are free, they can often have limited tool packages available as well as mandatory advertising on your page, which the content of which is displayed you might not be able to control.
The defining factor I have found on my personal needs level is the quality and appearance and ease of use of the web host's control panel. Bluehost, the current host I use for my Wow guild website and forum host has a very simple control scheme. It allows me to create quick groups of tools and services I used often when i log into their site.
Lastly, don't forget the bandwidth needs of your website. Depending on your web host you are allocated a certain weekly or monthly bandwidth. Through Bluehost I was allotted an amount of 5GB a month. Rarely ever had the guild ever used more than 1GB, I was thinking about reducing the amount when after several separate months our traffic had spiked to almost 4GB. Had i reduced the bandwidth amount i could of been hit with several charges which totaled over $120. Something i definitely couldn't afford being that this was a hobby organization.
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Nice write up Maddox. Selecting a company to host your services is one thing, but planning for bandwidth and how much of each service (database, processing, etc . . ) you are going to need is another. Cloud computing makes this easy because you only pay for what you use. There may be stipulations in the contract but the gist of it is you pay for what you need.
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