Choosing a Hosting Plan

Hosting is almost a commodity, each hosting company offers you a varying amount of space on a webserver, right? Wrong! When shopping for hosting, many people focus on features (including space, POP3 accounts, special software etc.) but tend to ignore the important components of customer service and load speed. With good Customer Service, if there is a problem with your site, you can get a solution in a matter of hours. Load speed will depend on the location of the webserver, the bandwidth of the connection to the internet, and the number of other websites sharing the server. If your web host has overloaded the server (and there is a strong temptation to increase profits this way) then your site will crawl. We stop adding sites to a server as soon as the CPU meter averages 60%.

There is one other choice you need to make; Windows or Linux. Performace-wise they are almost the same. Given the same machine, your site will be just as fast whether on a Windows Server or Linux Server. If you are on a budget, Linux Servers are cheaper as the Linux operating system is free.

Choose Windows hosting if

• You plan to maintain your own webpages using Frontpage.
• You plan to use MS Access as your backend database and you need to periodically download the database for updates or special processing.

Test load speed: this site is hosted on a Windows Hosting Plan

View Windows Hosting Plans

Choose Linux hosting if

• You need the absolute lowest price.
• You plan to set up your website using lots of free Open Source software and cgi-bin scripts.
• You plan to use MySQL, Postgres or Oracle as your backend database.

Test load speed: the WildWebWidget site is hosted on a Linux Hosting Plan

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Chinese Hosting

If you are actively targeting the Chinese market, you will get the fastest load time by hosting your site in China. There are other issues to consider.

View Chinese Hosting Plans