dtcnet.co.uk

As some of you may have noticed, the site was down for like over 2 or 3 weeks in Janurary due to problems with my old web host, but only two webhosts and three servers later it was back! I’ve been meaning for a while to write this post to offer some advice for those looking for budget web hosting based on the lessons I learned through this experience.

If you’re not overly experienced with webhosting etc, be aware that most packages labelled “Business” or even “Small business” have webspace and a transfer limit vastly beyond the needs of a small business.

While the £10 per month most of these “small business” packages cost gets you fantastic support, it’s paying for masses of resources you simply don’t need. From my experience, small business websites manage very nicely with only a couple of hundred MB webspace and as a rule of thumb ten times that amount of bandwidth.

However it seems that many of the webhosts out there are content in basically ripping customers off in order to minimise their work load and maximise their efficiency. After looking into setting up my own hosting company I can understand this decision, but I can’t help but feel that they are relying on the ignorance of the masses to vastly oversell their product.

It’s worth looking for cheap hosting and definitely compare the packages of several hosts but the most important lessons I learned were:

1. Check the host has a physical postal address which is not a PO Box
2. Check they are a registered company in your country (UK residents can use the Companies House Web Check service)
3. Find a package that suits your needs
4. Check they have a similar server configuration to your old server

The first two help to build up confidence that the company is real and can be called to answer your country under your laws for any wrong doings.

See my little rant above for an explanation of the third

The forth just saves downtime and errors when you upload your site. I found one of the servers I was placed on didn’t have su_exec turned on, which to be honest I’d never heard of before, but it meant that my php scripts didn’t have group permissions and could only write to files set to world writable. After I knew of this potential problem, when transferring my other sites I just put a request that they be place on a server with su_exec enabled.