Before you speak to a web hosting company

I my previous post I discussed the provisions for hosting your website. In order for a web hosting company to accurately determine the level of service required, they’re going to ask some questions. I thought I’d add a quick list of the kind of questions they’re likely to ask:

• Do you need a scripting technology?
  Scripting is most commonly used to access a database. If you need to store information of any kind, you’ll need a database, and you’ll need to choose a scripting language to access that information. Your developer should be able to help with this information.
• Will you need a database?
  Related to the previous question, your need for a database will be based on whether you need to store information. Very few commercial websites created today will be pure HTML, without a requirement for a database.
• How many visitors per minute/hour/day are you expecting?
  This question will allow the hostng company to determine whether a shared hosting environment (where you share a single server with other websites) will provide sufficient resources for your website, or whether you’ll need a server to yourself (aka ‘dedicated server’)
• Will you be managing the server(s) yourself?
  If you need a dedicated server, do you have the skills to manage the server yourself, or will you pay extra for the hosting company to do this for you. This is normally limited to keeping the server software up-to-date and performing other routine maintenance.
• Will you be storing customer’s personal information?
  If you’re asking customers to provide personal information and storing that in your database there may be a need to extra security, for example secure (SSL) certificates. This may affect the service offered.
• Are you likely to add more than one website to your server?
  If this is the first in a number of online businesses, it may pay to plan ahead and commission a server that can handle more than one website.

There are doubtless others that I’ve missed, but I wanted to get these down before I forgot them.

–
Paul
http://webequity.org/