Picking a hosting site for your pagan web

If you have read a couple of our first articles on this web, you know the importance of planning out your website. While planning, you should also begin the process of selecting a web host who will be able to meet your needs and provide you with the services and support you will need for your web site.

This is not rocket science, but it can be fraught with hidden traps and surprises. Most often, one finds hosts whose technical and help support staff, to put it bluntly, could care less about your questions or needs. They operate at such low profit margins, it isn't worth their time to deal with you after you sign. I've got a couple I can recommend, and warnings about special situations you may encounter.

Hosting providers give the potential customer a list of the following services:

1. A domain name and registration for your web.
2. Web space to host the web. Often 1 or 2 gb.
3. CGI script and/or PHP or Perl languages.
4. Sometimes free email for the domain.
5. Database access, usually MySQL.
6. Bandwidth allocations and limits, usually way more than needed.


Selecting a web host

First off, a web hosting service selection is a lot like buying a car. Everyone flashes a smile and sells a flashy looking site and features to you. The differences are in the fine print and first interactions with the support staff.

Yahoo or Google provide catalogs of rating sites for different providers and these are a good start for all of the various providers out there.

Deciding on the potential site is a mix of figuring out who provides the best mix of resources for the money being spent. Often, you can get a great deal with a year of service for a single low cost, or you can pay monthly. It really all depends on the hosting provider.

How to choose the provider is something of a black art, but I have learned, after several bitter experiences, to interview customers who use the provider. I now interview three customers to get a feel for the kind of support I'll get and this allows me to find a good provider with some confidence that the history of the new host is a good one.

Another key aspect of providers is that they claim to be doing site backups and maintenance of sites, but it really does fall to you to backup and be sure your data and site files are in your possession.

For example, I had a very bad experience this year with AceHost, our provider on IAmAWitch.Com, when they lost my entire web site in a disk accident and neglected to backup the server.

I now backup the site weekly, and it makes a lot of sense to not place trust in the provider, even when their so-called policy states that they do backup their site. You can imagine the panic when I found the entire web gone and realized that I had lost roughly two weeks of data, right after a big site move...

Lesson? Backup your data. Use a good FTP program like "FTP Voyager" or similar. I backup once a week and then I rip the site backups to CD and store them in a secure location about once a quarter.

Site scripts and languages

If you use Perl or PHP based scripts (two of the most common web languages), you can run custom scripting applications and blog sites on a potential hosting provider. Often, the provider will have a pre-scripted arrangement on the site, or offers "instant" applications like "Fantastico" that allow for a customer to have sophisticated applications on their web in mere minutes.

This is not for unsophisticated users. You are on your own in these cases, and must edit the templates and underlying source code to react and present just the sort of image or theme you want for your web site. In Pagan webs, it is often the case that web blogs are used with PHP and MySQL databases, and the webmaster who tackles these sorts of sites often has the needed training and experience to handle the requirements.

If you aren't sure what you want in this regard, keep it simple and just use "instant" sites that many providers give you. I've seen sites like Register.Com and similar that allow for these quickie presences. Just realize that the tradeoff is that your site will often look like a lot of others.

Databases

Databases are another key concern. If you are running scripts, often, they require a database backend to store and retrieve data. If you need a database and are not sure, hire a consultant to handle this part of your site. SQL (The query language that MySQL and most other relational databases use) is fairly easy to learn, but it takes time to become proficient with.

I highly recommend training yourself with a local copy of MySQL and getting a book or two on the subject so you have some experience at managing tables and databases. PHPAdmin is often the tool used to manage MySQL databases, and many web hosting providers provide similar interfaces for this package. Getting to know the basics of a MySQL database is a key to succeeding in web hosting, and using your PC to do this is indeed a great way to start.

Email on your domain

Email is another concern. If you host with a web provider, they often will register the domain of choice and they even go so far as to give you nearly unlimited email addresses to host on the site.

Frankly, most people come nowhere near the limit, but sites like mine (that use commercial services outside of my provider) run upwards of 5,000 user email accounts and are a giant part of my presence. In most cases, you will give web accounts to people you know and trust, and won't need to worry about it too much, but you should take time to get to know all of the email capabilities and utilities that your provider has on hand.

You can use webmail to access mail on these accounts, or use a POP based email client like Outlook Express to reach the mail and go from there. I structure a lot of my default mail to go to the local domain email account so I can see mail from my web site and seperate this from my other email.

If you do choose an external host to provide free email services, it can introduce complexities. I use Everyone.Net for my email host, and they are an absolutely amazing bunch there. I've had great service from them over the years, and they have been supportive in a wide range of cases where I needed custom support. In cases like this, where you host a domain like IAmAWitch.Com on multiple sites, you can run into complications when your web host tries to tell you that you cannot use an external email hosting provider. I have a unique solution to this and if you have questions, email me for specifics.

Recommendations and Best Practices

I host a duplicate of my website on my system at home. The reason is that I can manage changes to the website and databases on a development server rather than to take risks with the production web.

Essentially, I take a recent backup of the site and host it on my local PC web server and then just customize the settings so it runs locally. Then, I can break all the systems I want with little or any problems. It makes a lot of sense, and if you have the skill level, it certainly goes a long way to improving your ability to change the site with little chance of failure.

Conclusion

I host sites with AceHost and Globat. Each has their good and bad sides, but ultimately, I have found that they provide great services, as long as I don't expect too much of either.

I'm responsible for my own backups and data handling and avoid using help support from these providers, since the support often is very limited anyway. If you pay monthly support, you can often get better and more personal help than if you host the way I do with a "pay for a year up front" type of provider who wants your money and then to not hear from you.

The advantage of the pay-once provider is that you get more disk and more bandwidth, bacause these guys deal in huge customer bases and must operate that way to make up for the less personal service.

Either way, you get a wide range of services and most providers are pretty good. If you aren't sure about a provider, the trick is to search for bad reports about them on the web. If you see a lot of them, it might be worth looking for a new host.

Canceling a host of often a real trick. I've had to quit a number of them, and I ended up forbidding my bank to pay them as a last resort in a couple of cases. Getting rid of them is like getting rid of a tick. It hurts and no one like the process ;>)

This article will continue on next week... I'll cover how to handle Pagan unfriendly personnel and what tools you will need to get started with hosting the site.

Until then - Blessed Be.