Ask ten people to recommend a Web hosting company and you will get ten different answers. Finding the right place to host your Web sites is a bit of a minefield, so hopefully this article will offer some insight into the options available and help you make the right choice.

If you need some suggestions right now, cut to the chase and jump down to the bottom of this page for my quick UK Web host recommendations.

While simple static sites can be hosted free, there is a vast array of options available for hosting scripted or data-driven Web applications such as CMS, eCommerce, blogs, etc. Cost varies from £1.50/month right up to £350/month and beyond.

Dedicated, VPS, shared?

The four main categories of Web hosting (with typical monthly prices in £UK) are:

  1. Shared hosting, free-£30
    A physical server is divided up and shared amongst hundreds of customers. Because partitioning is within the operating system, there is potential for some sites to hog system resources, breach security boundaries or even crash the server. In short, you’re relying on a host’s ring-fencing technology and the responsible use by other customers on the same server.
  2. Virtual Private Server (VPS), £15-£80
    By partitioning a physical server, each VPS runs its own operating system and behaves like a dedicated server with all of the security and some of the performance benefits without the cost of a dedicated server, or the potential problems of shared hosting. Resources are shared evenly between each VPS and this makes for consistent performance.
  3. Co-located server, £30-£300 (1U rack space)
    Your own server located at an ISP data centre. Only necessary if you have very unique or specific hardware or software requirements. Do what you want with it, but you’re responsible.
  4. Dedicated server, £50-£350
    Your server, only your own sites are hosted, so nobody else can hog resources or crash your server. More flexibility in terms of customising setup and installing and upgrading software.

Many Web sites will appear to perform almost identically whether they are sitting on a cheap shared host or a top-end dedicated server. So why is there such a vast difference in price?

Web hosting is now a highly competitive commodity service. The main factors determining price are:

  1. resilience and reliability – uptime; commonly 99.99%+ for HTTP, but database servers can have problems and may not be measured in uptime stats.
  2. performance – general web site response time and data throughput.
  3. capacity – ability to cope with high volumes of traffic or spikes.
  4. ‘over selling’ – the number of other sites hosted on each server and controls placed on customer accounts. Beware of ‘unlimited bandwidth’ – although bandwidth is rarely unlimited, this often translates to ‘busy server’.
  5. features – backup, control panels, SSL certificates, auto installers, storage and data transfer allocation.
  6. support – what are you responsible for yourself and how quickly can you get help when you need it?

So, start by determining your present and future needs – the number and scale of Web sites to be hosted, mission-critical status, support required, etc.

If you already use shared hosting, try ipneighbour to find out how many other sites are hosted on your server. The results can be quite interesting, and alarming.

Platform

The platform of choice for hosting Web sites is still predominantly Linux/Unix for ubiquitous LAMP applications, CMS and blogs or JAVA, Rails, or Python apps.

Most shared hosting runs on a solid Linux platform and some hosts use grid or clustering technology which is supposed to offer performance, resilience and scalability benefits. In practice, these can under perform compared to a decent VPS or dedicated server, but for many people it’s a good enough alternative.

If you particularly need to run .ASP scripts or .NET applications, you will have to go down the proprietary Microsoft route. Just make sure the server is fully patched and set up correctly – these servers are constantly under attack and blighted by security problems, despite recent improvements.

PHP 4 / 5

As one of the most widely used scripting languages for Web applications, good PHP support is essential. PHP5 was released way back in 2004 and PHP4 has now reached end of life. Unfortunately, many Web hosts still only support PHP4 and some offer only outdated releases of PHP5.

There are many significant benefits – performance, security, functionality – to using recent stable versions of PHP5 and many of today’s increasingly demanding Web applications require it. PHP5 also has much better support for Web services, XML, JSON etc.

So, choose a good Web host with up to date PHP5 support (5.2+ ideally). Hosting companies tend not to upgrade PHP on their servers, so start with a recent version or you could find yourself lumbered with a server which won’t run a lot of modern Web applications.

Reliability

So what about uptime? It actually varies little between the average hosts and the best ones. Decide if your Web sites really are mission critical. If they’re not, the rare possibility of a short outage might be worth what could be a considerable cost saving.

Side-note: if you think your hosting needs to be mission critical, then your Web site usability definitely should be! Bad usability can lose you far more visitors/customers than an unreliable Web host.

Shared hosting – getting better

Recent years have seen increasing popularity of VPS as a more cost-effective alternative to dedicated servers.

Shared hosting, traditionally unreliable, has also seen the emergence of premium level shared services which have made significant improvements in performance and reliability. This blurs the boundaries between shared and VPS hosting, just as VPS has with dedicated.

Multi-domain and reseller hosting

Most hosting packages on offer these days allow customers to further sub-let their own web space; several domains (in the 10’s or 100’s) can to be hosted on a single shared or VPS account. Sometimes this is pitched as a ‘reseller’ option, although most server appliance control panels, such as Plesk, support reseller activity and some have direct billing facilities.

You can also set up client areas with their own control panel access, quotas and allocations. You can even brand your control panel to make it look like you provide and run hosting services yourself.

Domain names and DNS management

Another important element of Web hosting and Internet services is domain name management. If you look after multiple domains, it is important to use a good domain host with a decent full-feature control panel and a sensible policy on moving and re-tagging domains.

Most Web hosts offer DNS management, but it’s probably worth managing this elsewhere, with a well established and stable company. Moving domains can be more difficult and disruptive than moving web sites. Updating DNS records to point to a new host or server is relatively straightforward compared to re-tagging your domains to a new IPS.

Finding a good hosting company

Assuming you have identified your hosting requirements, you then have the difficult task of finding a good company to fulfill those needs.

Ask around for some recommendations, but treat these with caution. The experience one lucky, or unlucky, customer has with a hosting company may not be an accurate reflection of the real situation.

Search the Internet for hosting reviews. Most hosting companies get slated on forums and review sites, so be wary of single reviews from disgruntled individuals or suspiciously glowing reviews. Look for a consensus and trust your instinct.

Web Hosting Talk is one of the main hosting forums,

Server location

If your Web sites target users in a particular country, it is best to host on a server which is located in that country. The main benefits of serving your sites from the same country as your users are:

  1. SEO: search engine rankings can be affected by which country your web site’s IP number is registered to. Because search results are commonly tuned to the country each user is located in, hosting on a server in a different country can reduce search result rankings, often significantly. Hosting companies know this and often conceal the location of their data centres.
  2. resilience: reduced points of failure if network traffic has fewer hops to make.
  3. performance: slightly better if your local host is a good one.


My Web host recommendations

I have the dubious honour of looking after a variety of servers and hosting accounts for my UK clients as well as myself. This gives me plenty of hands-on experience and the unique ability to compare and contrast.

I will be posting a more detailed review of UK-oriented Web hosting companies in due course. But for now, here’s a taster based on my experiences so far…

  • Rackspace: one of the best – great performance and resilience. Premium service, premium prices.
  • United Hosting – UK and US data centres, premium shared and dedicated hosting. Very focused on server/network performance and reliability, with truly outstanding customer support.
  • 1and1: good value packages, reliable but mediocre performance despite the massive network. 1and1’s atrocious support is legendary. GeoIP warning: data centres in Germany.
  • Servage: feature-packed ‘value’ shared hosting, big cluster setup promises much but delivers shocking unreliability. GeoIP warning: data centres might be lurking in Germany, Sweden or Denmark.
  • 34SP: good range of budget hosting options, but cheaper shared hosting has had some reliability problems. Reasonable support. Still not shaken off the ‘hobbyist’ tag. Now offers VPS. Certainly worth considering.

Other promising Web hosts; I can’t claim any first hand experience with these, but research indicates these companies are very well regarded:

  • InnoHosting – UK and US data centres, well-priced shared, VPS and dedicated hosting. One to watch?
  • MediaLayer – US data centres, LAMP optimised shared or dedicated hosting.
  • Media Temple – US data centres, grid/cluster shared, VPS and dedicated hosting. Does it live up to the hype?
  • 5QuidHost – great value US/UK LAMP hosting. Looks rather ‘back-bedroom’, but enjoys an increasingly good reputation.
  • Slicehost – US data centres, high performance bare bones Linux VPS for hardcore techies.

Look out for my detailed Web hosting reviews, coming soon. All will revealed, in my no holds barred review. In the mean time, if you have any good or bad experiences with a Web hosting company, please let me know.