What to Look for Choosing Hosting Services

By: Alex Green

[ Posted On: 2007-01-25 ]

Web hosting market is often called "market for lemons", which points out the fact that it's very difficult or even impossible to determine the quality of hosting services prior to signing on, and features of the plan extolling hosting offers won't shed any light on the type of product you're going to buy.

Problem Posing

The asymmetry of information reveals itself in the fact that the most important factors for the quality of the server performance are the processor loading, RAM usage, hard drive speed, RAID usage. Do clients often take them into account choosing a package plan? Judging by the forum requests, not really.

If the hardware discs are big, the server has to process bigger amount of information. The speed and often reliability isn't very high. Such server should be used for storing files and hosting non-mission critical sites running few scripts. If SCSI disc is installed into RAID, the server performance gets better than in the first case. You can host highly visited and mission critical sites on it. But the cost of the disc space on the second server will be higher. So, 500Mbs of disc space on one server is absolutely different from 500Mbs on the other server.

Hosting clients should be aware that each hosting provider offers a "unique" service, one can provide low-cost hosting, another specializes in powerful hosting, and the third can deliver reliable DDOS protection to his clients. The idea is to determine your needs and don't use "disc space" parameter as the main feature while deciding on a hosting company.
Hosting Features

It was traffic that reflected server load some time ago. The more traffic, the more visits to the site, so the greater load on the server. More bandwidth in package plans meant more system resources. But today things have changed, overselling has come here to stay.

The feature "the number of MySQL" is simply neglected by the number of hosting providers. You can often see "unlimited MySQL" in beginners' plans. And that's MySQL usage that creates additional load on the server.

Such features as the number of email boxes, ftp accounts, PHP support can be the same in different hosting packages. You can't judge about the package plan by them.

So, disc space is what's left to go by. This is what majority do. But this is a common misconception.

Often sites "fitting" into the disc space use more resources than allotted in the package price. Then the hoster has to ask his client to upgrade to a bigger plan or to leave the server.

Solution to the Problem

The question about these discrepancies has been raised more than once before. The research showed that there is a limit for the number of processes executed on the server per second for every account. And this variable is different for each hosting company. But do clients choosing hosting think about this? This variable makes a site perform with a different degree of effectiveness.

We've tried to shed some light on the nuances of hosting services and helped you to choose the hosting to suit your needs. Powerful hosting costs more, even if the disc space isn't big.

The good thing is that hosting companies have become more sensitive to the nuances described and plans have become more flexible.

Article Source: http://www.afroarticles.com/article-dashboard

About The Author: Alex Green works on webhosting provider. Providing cheap shared hosting deals

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