Before driving a series dedicated to the choice of hosting service. In this first guide we talk about the analysis of the basic requirements for the selection of a service, or how to understand what we need and at what level.

Choosing a Hosting service – Guide dedicated to the basic steps to choose which service is best for us.

First part of an article that seeks to clarify which aspects are essential to arrive at a choice of web hosting service. I think, this has been asked several times actually, this article will be a sum of what has been said and repeated. There would be no sense to write an article like this first even for our staff, for me personally, ESDS inevitably has enriched the knowledge of our users, and as well as our own.

An article that speaks only about the factors in choosing a web hosting service, so we will treat explicitly only the appearance of web pages related to hosting services and dedicated to the web.

Choosing the dedicated hosting service – Requirements Analysis

Before you think about what will be our hosting service, it is important to understand what are the reasons why (that) we are choosing a web hosting service, or understand what we’re going to put on our space, and what features it should have. It is not a trivial step in our path, we could even say that it is one of the most important, given that, once defined what we call in the jargon specific to our project, we will have more clear idea for our real needs.

There are hosting services for virtually any type of website or application, more standard, ranging from the more personalized, cost and of course different methods of management. Therefore ask what kind of website we are going to need, trying to figure out first whether it is a static site (static web pages and images) or dynamic (formed by pages so that it exchanges data with a database or using a language server-side programming, such as php and mysql). It is important to understand this because a static site gets thousands of hits, hardly require (requires) resources equivalent to those of the same site that uses a database and is built with a scripting language.

In the first case of a static site, there will be a few other variables in play, but even here among these we find the web space and traffic needed again, you must figure out how many megabytes of  space the site will be occupying, and how many megabytes or gigabytes of traffic is produced on your website every month.

In the second case, if it is a dynamic site, we just do not know how much web space and bandwidth will be consumed, it is also essential to know how many users visit our site daily, and even more important, how about those who come at once. A community, for example, must focus on these data in order to understand what resources will it really need. If our site is a blog, unlike a community, despite being constructed on a dynamic platform, requires less resources, but also in this case a proper analysis of the statistics of visits and the online presence of users is important.

As a “dimension” in project numbers, first of all, if we have our website hosted on a hosting service, we favor the statistics and those relating to the daily visits and traffic (measured in gigabytes or megabytes) consumed each month. Have some initial statistics from which the case is always more lucky, but if it is our first experience and it is a new project, better to refer to parameters such as advertising, consider that if it is advertised on the network, and try to estimate the public based on sites or projects similar to ours.

Finally, we also consider two other aspects that will affect a lot on our final choice: will our website produce a gain for us or is it just for the hobby? Does it provide an important service and is intended for a customer? Two questions that are often underestimated, if our site / project is just a hobby we can afford to “prove” any service, knowing that we will still be a secondary thing, but if our site is an asset for us, and therefore brings earnings, carefully consider the hosting that we are going to choose. This happens for example in the case of an e-commerce portal, where the reliability of our website, minimized downtime, and service provider are essential, because we have Revenue from that activity.

Very often you see sites in the network which are also of some importance who entrust their data to entry-level solutions or amateur providers, with obvious risks if something serious happens.