Marilyn Braun said:
I mentioned this a while ago, I'm planning on starting a website - taking the entries on my blog and organizing them onto a website. I think Richard mentioned something about the different places to host, one was expressionengine. I think there were two other suggestions but I don't remember them. Help!
Okay. ExpressionEngine isn't a host, it's a CMS - content management system. Think Blogger, but much more advanced. The guys who make it run a hosting company, pMachineHosting, but that's a different thing entirely.
As far as webhosts go, I can't make too many specific suggestions - it's not my specialist subject - but here's some guidelines to keep in mind.
SHARED HOSTING: This means 'there are several people on the server'. This can cause problems, because some clown can screw things up for everyone else - slowing down performance or battering the MySQL server or whatever, but it's still the best option unless you become huge. Dedicated servers are very expensive, and you really don't want to do tech-support on them. Go with Linux for preference. It gives you more flexibility when choosing software and getting help on it, and it's usually cheaper too.
COST: Between $5 and $10 a month. This is a reasonable middle-ground between 'way too cheap' and 'overpriced'. I use HostGator, which is based out of Florida, and I pay about $10. Not had any problems with them. However, and this is important, the rule about getting what you pay for DOES NOT NECESSARILY APPLY. You can get great service cheap, you can get appalling service for a rip-off fee. Take it into consideration, but don't assume that size, or cost, is everything. Some of the crappiest hosts are the giants that over-populate their servers.
BANDWIDTH: This is the amount of data your site can transfer per month. Look for between 5GB and 10GB as a general amount, although some of the larger hosts go into crazy-lengths (Dreamhost currently offers a terabyte on its basic storage plan, which is generally described as '8,000 times more data than a human brain retains in a lifetime'.) Sometimes this is fine, the company's just banking on the fact that nobody will use more than a couple of gigs so it can put whatever number it wants on the adverts, other times it's a screaming AWOOOGA! AWOOOGA! of danger ahead.
Basic text and images won't cut into it too much, but video or MP3 files will chew it up and spit it out. Best to have it there in case. And whatever you get, look for gigabytes, not megabytes. Bandwidth isn't as expensive as you might think these days, and pricing plans are based on people not using up their allocation anyway.
Importantly, if you run out of your allocation, one of three things will happen. The first is that you won't even notice, and the company will suck up the occasional heavy month (for instance, your site gets linked from the likes of Slashdot or Boing Boing, and your traffic spikes for a couple of days) and only ask you to switch to a more expensive hosting package if it remains at that level. Second, your site gets switched off until you either pay for extra bandwidth or next month rolls around with your next quota. Third, and this is the one you want to watch out for, you get automatically charged for the excess bandwidth you use. All three are standard in the market, but make sure you know which is in effect - and how much it might cost if you get popular.
(That said, don't buy a ludicrous hosting plan off the bat just in case you need it - start small and worry about popularity if and when it comes. Every host will be glad to upsell you one of its more powerful packages should you need to upgrade, and most sites don't get anywhere near the critical point)
DISK SPACE: At least a gigabyte for $10, most services will give you more. You won't even scratch that with the average site, but it's good to have for holding media files, high-res images and similar. Additional disk space on an account gets very pricey.
A CONTROL PANEL: Ideally, look for CPanel. It's as close to the standard you'll find, and gives you control over everything from mail, to backups, to the automatic installer program Fantastico, which will just put things like WordPress onto your site in seconds.
PHP: Ideally 5, at minimum, high in the 4s.
BACKUPS: Make sure these happen automatically, and find out how they work. You'll take your own as well, but the company should always be able to roll-back in the event of a hacker attack or you screwing something up. This often involves a small extra charge if it's your fault, which is fine.
MYSQL: At least one database - preferably three, but look for unlimited if you can. This lets you split things up much more easily. For instance, on my site, I have one database for ExpressionEngine, one for Stories of Strength, and one for my stats software. You don't need to know a damn thing about MySQL to use these - but you do need them to power any serious blogging or CMS tool.
SMALL PRINT: Make sure there aren't any bizarre restrictions, penalty clauses, limitations on what you can use.
Bear in mind, these are just guidelines to use. You get good and crap services at every level. Here's where things get tricky.
Never, ever type something like 'web hosting reviews' into your browser. Most of them are shills. Finding an honest writeup is next to impossible - either people go nuts over how awful their host is, or rave about it, right next a link that earns them money every time someone clicks it. Ignore any awards, no matter how cool they look. Most of them aren't worth the pixels they're printed on.
Forums on the subject exist, and are a bit like the river of slime from Ghostbusters 2, but importantly, are mostly full of power users, not necessarily representative of what you want to do (for instance, Dreamhost offers incredibly cheap hosting, but is highly, highly unpopular amongst hardcore users for reasons - like slow database connections and slightly higher than average downtime - that may or may not matter to you. However, it also has one of the biggest referral networks in the universe, to the extent that the people plugging it (even if being completely honest) aren't easily going to shake the feeling that they're whoring their opinion out for a cheque. Either way, neither pro nor con sides are worth taking on faith.)
Even if a review is perfectly honest, most of them will be out of date. You want to know what services are like now - 2005 at least - not what they were like in 2002. A service that was great then may have grown too fast, or improved on previously shoddy performance.
Best thing to do is to browse the web and make a shortlist of hosts that seem to fit the bill, then search them directly. Look on sites like WordPress or ExpressionEngine and the other techie minded sites, and make use of the hosts with 30-60 day trial periods. This will let you get a feel for how they perform for what you want them to do. For instance, my site on HostGator runs fine - when I tried it on 1&1, every single page took at least 15 seconds longer to load.
That said,
WebHostingTalk can be okay. Don't use it for a final decision, but the discussions will often throw up both persistent problems and comments from the staff of major webhosts that you can use to guide your searching. Remember though, very much power-user territory (who else sits around talking about web hosts all day?)
Next, an important bit.
NEVER SIGN UP FOR YOUR DOMAIN WITH A HOSTING PROVIDER
They'll all offer freebies, and they might work okay, but they put you into a position you really don't want to be in: if you ever move host, or the company goes down, you may have to fight for that name. Go with a big registrar like GoDaddy or 123-reg, and your host gets absolutely no say in where that domain name points to. More importantly, you don't risk the age-old trick of a company registering the domain in their name rather than yours, and refusing to hand it over. If you've built up a reputation, the last thing you want is to have to change it overnight - and while most hosts are perfectly honourable about this, don't get me wrong, you don't want your site held to ransom by a cowboy.
(In a similar vein, one of the best things about CPanel and similar is that you can take backups whenever you want. You should do this regularly, of both your files and databases, so you can click them into a new host if anything goes wrong.)
There's more, but it's 2:30am and I'm sleepy. Best just ask questions and we'll try to help accordingly ;-)
I'm starting to get very confused with all of the tech talk. I have no idea what to do with opensourcecms - if I understood what the various terms mean it would probably be very interesting to play around with.
