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Web Hosting Guideand experience by Vadim Makarov
The Price of FreedomWhy yoursite.com? If you care about things you publish on the Internet and respect your readers, these two steps are absolutely necessary:
Buy your own second-level domain name, e.g. yoursite.com, without anything in front of and behind it (www. doesn’t count). Once registered, the domain name becomes your property as long as you pay the annual fee to the registrar. This is your permanent address: if you don’t like how your pages are hosted, you can move them to another hosting company at any time and all page addresses (URLs) remain the same. Nothing changes for your site visitors. If you don’t like how your registrar maintains your domain name for you - take it to another registrar, it won’t break anything either.
If you don’t own one, you are fully dependent on the company that gives you the address (e.g. yoursubdomain.hostcompany.com or hostcompany.com/yourdir/). Should something go wrong or you are no longer affiliated with the company (either will happen, sooner or later) - and you lose all your visitors and popularity because your pages no longer have URLs they used to be at; your work is wasted; your readers cannot find the pages they want.
Host your site with a commercial hosting company (with your own domain, you won’t find free hosting anyway). Since you pay, they are eager to keep it up 24x7 and maintain the server in order. If you are not satisfied, there are scores of other hosting companies to choose from; a move is easy. Yes, that means you are paying a regular fee from now on, but this is the only way to be independent and have full control over your site.
No, there is no way around it. The most common pitfall is domain redirection schemes: you host your site wherever you can (usually for free), register your own domain name and pay a small fee to a company that makes your site appear to have your domain name. Unfortunately, no redirection technology works exactly the way a normal hosting does. At best, it will lead to unpleasant surprises and technical problems to some of your visitors and your site will never be indexed correctly by the Internet search engines (that alone is enough to not use redirection).
No, there is no free lunch. These services intrinsically cost money. There is a company that offers second-level domain names for free, supported with massive advertising, but make no mistake - they own it, not you, and it’s indeed they who dictate the rules. Why waste time. Pay a moderate amount and get the real thing. It’s more than affordable today (domain name and decent hosting costs $100-150/year; if you get into temporary financial straits later in your life, you can always switch to free hosting with redirection while keeping your domain name, $15-25/year). Have respect for your readers and for yourself. Enough said.
Redirecting from Old URLsSadly, by the time one realizes all this, usually he or she already has pages published on URLs that somebody else controls. To handle it with the least loss, you need to replace every HTML page at your old URL with a custom redirection page pointing at exactly the same page on your new permanent site (not just to the site main page). Make sure these redirection pages at the old location live as long as possible (one year at the very least, several years better).
Feel free to take my example of redirection page as a template. Note that you need to edit URL in three places in the page source to replace each of your pages. It didn’t take me long to replace a hundred pages on my site by hand; if you know Perl, you can write a script and publish it here. I also replaced every image file on my old site with a small image-notice (JPEG or GIF) in case somebody linked to images directly or used them on their pages. Still, you’re creating small inconveniences to a lot of people (including yourself) and you’d better set your site up the right way as soon as possible.
By now I’ve dealt with six hosts (four of them commercial) and four registrars, so it’s time to sum up this little experience.
Where To Look for ThemEvery top-level domain (TLD) authority has a list of accredited registrars, i.e. companies that can register and maintain domain name for you. The authority for .com, .org and .net TLD is ICANN, but InterNIC site provides a better organized list of registrars. For other TLDs, such as two-letter country code ones, look for the corresponding local authority. For instance, for .no - Norway - it is NORID with its own list of registrars for .no domain and registration rules, which are rather restrictive comparing to "anyone can" policy for .com, .org and .net.
Looking for a good domain name may take time. Most common words and short domain names have already been taken.
Web site hosting is a different service. Firms offering it are in abundance (just look around) and it is very competitive, because it takes little effort to move your site elsewhere in the world. Look for "own domain name" option in the hosting plans. Let me name one directory where you can search through many providers and plans: HostSearch. Or, if you prefer a listing less obscured by business front-ends and greed for customers, here is a list of some of the world’s largest physical hosting providers from Netcraft.
Almost always, you can register a domain name when you sign up for a hosting plan. Even if the hosting company is not a registrar, they will handle it for you through another firm that is a registrar. Some companies offer hosting and are registrars at the same time, but that’s not necessarily an advantage.
Lessons LearnedMajor
Everybody screams about 24x7 uptime. Only few have it.
I haven’t found an ideal hosting company. There always was something wrong.
Custom configuration is something a hosting company won’t do (not for small and mid-sized accounts, at least). Ask as many questions as you can up front. If it isn’t going to work exactly the way you need, look for another company. Don’t sign up for a plan with non-refundable setup fee: free trial is really necessary. Stick to ones using mainstream software (e.g. UNIX/Apache and not Microsoft something): it has less chance to cause problems.A company that doesn’t have extensive technical information about user accounts on its site (and I do mean extensive, i.e. hundreds of pages), usually sucks in other ways, too.
You get what you pay for, or less than that (but never more). Note that the cheapest hosting plans have to make up money one way or another. Sometimes it can be found in fine print, sometimes you will discover it after you sign up. It’s more expensive to be stingy. Providers that skimp on their connectivity and computer resources are the worst ones.One way to save is to provide name-based hosting (many sites on a single IP address): your site won’t work with older HTTP 1.0 clients. Minor points
Never pay attention to that special expiring in two days. There are so many other firms around that chances are, you will find a better offer the next day. Just do your work at the pace you are comfortable with.
If you want to please users who have high-speed connection (> 1Mbps), host in the same geographical area or at least in the same part of the world where they reside. Throughput for Web and FTP traffic is ultimately limited by the physical distance to the host. A very large available bandwidth alone does not guarantee the fastest download speed (at least not with the present TCP implementations).
Most people are using slower connections, so this is actually not very important. Still, local hosting improves response times and consistency: there are fewer clogged networks to go through.
It may be easier to register under .com/.org/.net TLD than under a national domain, because there is stronger competition among registrars for the former ones and no bureaucratic restrictions apply.
My domain name - vad1.com - actually turned out to be a bad choice, for two reasons:
The numeral 1 and letter l look similar in some fonts and can be confused when somebody tries to type my domain name.
When I have to spell my domain name over phone (vee-ei-dee-one-dot-com), it’s confusing what one means: vadone.com, or what? Pick a domain name that can be spelled easily and unambiguously. Too bad, I’ve already seen a few clones of my mistake :-).

My Experience with Individual Firmshas been a series of unpleasant surprises. Indeed, you remember problems and not flawless operation. Every problem takes your time away from developing your site.
Quick summary (note that this is only a tiny slice of the vast Internet service providers market):
Hosting
Last dealt with
pair.com - good
have account (since 2001, currently on “Webmaster” plan. I estimate average uptime of my account since 2001 to be greater than 99.997%)
ZestHost - average(don’t use it unless you needsome cheap bandwidth)
have account (since 2005)
WebHostingBoy - unusable
2005
Tri Star Web - bad
2001
IICNet - bad
2001
Active ISP - bad and annoying(kept demanding payments forcancelled unsatisfactory service)May crash Netscape-->
2001

Registrars
Last dealt with
pairNIC - OK
have account (since 2004)
EasySpace - annoying(not good for anything exceptmaybe basic registrar service)
2006
Network Solutions - bad
2001
In short, I tried to host with three shitty providers until landing at one of the world largest (pair.com) where I happily continue to be now. End of story :-)
Of course, to get the full picture of what was good and what was bad with a particular service, and how it applies to your needs, you may want to wade through the details below (listed not quite in chronological order).
My journey into the world of commercial services started in 2000 when our department server died. All pages on the department site, including mine, were returning 404 File Not Found error for a week or so. Not Found response is worse than not responding: people and search engines think these pages are gone and delete their links. I repeatedly emailed the system administrator and in his last reply, he said that restoring Web hosting was not the first priority. So I turned to those who had 24x7 operation their only priority, besides making money on you, of course. Not that I didn’t understand what I described in the beginning of this page, but this trouble just showed me the issue in all its ugliness: your site is removed and you can’t do anything.
Somewhere on the Web I saw a tiny banner with attractive price for a 50MB hosting plan. I clicked it and found that the expiration date of the offer was yesterday, but it was still possible to fill in the form. It’s weekend, I thought, so they will be back to work on Monday and remove it. So I signed up in hurry. In the process, there was $40 non-refundable setup fee and they used an expensive registrar (Network Solutions, another $35/year fee), but I ate it.
On Monday, the special was extended. I was not lazy to check it regularly for the next eight months since June 2000 and they just kept changing the expiration date every week or so. The company is Tri Star Web, in case you like this kind of advertising.Noted in 2003: wonder why there is a porn site there? That’s what happens to domain names when the company sinks.
Slow response and low download speed (comparing to the server standing in the next room) was another rude surprise. I’ve since learned that this actually was normal performance for most hosting plans. A month later I asked them for a configuration change that I would have been able to do on the department server if my site had still been hosted there. After a bounce-type answer and my repeat request, they finally replied that this feature was available only on their most expensive hosting plan ($50/month). I’ve since learned that it was not the worst: at least, they did reply to every question.
A nice bonus was NetTracker statistics they provided for every account. Comparing to widespread tools that generate only overall reports from your server logs (e.g. free Analog), NetTracker allowed to easily follow footsteps of visitors and track trends. My site had relatively few users, so browsing detailed visit reports was possible. I found it very entertaining and useful. In a sense, it was like being in user’s shoes, despite all claims to the contrary. Good statistics is important. Unfortunately, NetTracker is quite expensive unless your provider includes it.
My site, which you’re on now, was hosted with Tri Star Web for almost a year. Then the hosting quality quickly went down the toilet. First the statistics server started to hang up, losing old reports, and was often not including logs for days. Then the main server became very unreliable. There were two weeks in a row when my site was mostly unavailable, despite intensive communication between me and the tech support, and I just had to move it to pair.com. I monitored my old account by IP number for some time: regular downtimes persisted. They couldn’t even properly record my cancellation notice submitted through the account control interface, and continued billing me.
In the process of moving, I discovered that Network Solutions did not really care about users making changes to their domain name records. Five years of absolute state-granted monopoly built them a brand recognition and large customer base, which now guarantees profit no matter how little they care about their users. With every other registrar, who charges half the price, changing nameservers would take at most five minutes with password-protected on-line form. I spent half an hour just trying to figure where to do it on Network Solutions site. Then I called their tech support. Another half an hour holding the line - and we observed how their ‘authentication scheme’ failed because my email address they had was different from what was now in the From: field of my emails. Not wanting to mess with faxing a request complete with photocopy of my passport just to fix an email address, I moved my domain name to EasySpace. Bad usability cost the company a customer.
The unfortunate side of this story is that I couldn’t change nameservers listed with my domain name for about a week - exactly when I most needed it. Moving between registrars is not a quick operation. I therefore advise you to check that you can change nameservers easily with your registrar.
After signing up with Tri Star Web, I didn’t quite like it, so when I had to host another site (www.skazka.no), I chose a local Norwegian registrar and hosting company, Active ISP (they were just running a special). Another person who writes Norwegian well and I managed to go through the order form at fourth or fifth attempt (it was timing out before we were able to submit all the necessary info). After few emails, a month of waiting and two phone calls, they finally registered the domain name and set up the account. The site control panel didn’t work in Netscape, only in Internet Explorer, but much worse, all our pages in Russian encoding were severely handicapped in Netscape: the text displayed in wrong encoding until all images on the page completely loaded. They used Microsoft Commercial Internet System on their server; on my other accounts with UNIX/Apache the problem didn’t exist. It was not the first time I saw Microsoft screwing up everybody else and neglecting compatibility, but I demanded to fix it because 30% of our site visitors were using Netscape. Their answer was to install Internet Explorer. I hope you understand that nobody controls what browser a visitor to your site uses. After a couple more emails and two phone calls, they finally admitted in writing they couldn’t fix it for Netscape. So, two months after signing up, the new permanent address of the site was not ready for publicizing and I was looking for another host. To make things worse, it turned out that Active ISP did not support domain names for sites that are hosted with another provider (i.e. did not allow external DNS servers), so I had to transfer the domain name to another registrar. There are things you wouldn’t realize until there is a trouble.Later note: It took us eight months and numerous emails and calls to Active ISP to explain that they should drop the full one-year hosting fee from the bill they kept re-sending to us. For that they got my ‘bad and annoying’ rating.Deja vu: exactly a year after the first sign-up, we received an invoice for reneval of the hosting and registar service (cancelled long ago). Did they assume it would be overlooked and paid them automatically? This just stinks.Subscriber forever: they got extra credit for continuing spamming me their newsletter, after all the above.
Forced to find another host, I moved the site to IICNet (web229.net) physically located in Los Angeles, fully expecting low performance and support at the price it came. What was fun, they also had a prominent ‘special’ ("double your disk space") with regularly refreshing ‘expiration date’. In the next few months, my expectations were more than confirmed (by prolonged downtimes in particular). In March 2001, I left them for pair.com, after a recommendation from a reader of this page that can be found below.
In 2001, I wanted to secure skazka.org domain name, in addition to skazka.no. Then if somebody tries to guess it, there are better chances he comes to the right site. Filling in the order form on EasySpace registrar site was a breeze and redirection worked within a day. Everything seemed easy and flawless until I tried to recommend EasySpace to a friend of mine. He had an old browser - Internet Explorer 2.0 - on his lab PC and when I typed www.skazka.org, an ugly Easyspace ad page appeared instead of our site. The URL remained www.skazka.org and there was no hint of our site, just somebody’s flashy advertising. I then tried it in WebTV viewer (an emulator of the Internet access device that is currently being sold) and got the ad page again. After fierce complaining to Easyspace about stealing my domain name, they said it worked correctly in WebTV viewer they installed on their computer (was it a lie?) and refused to fix it for old browsers (without explanation, of course; I later learned of "name-based" vs. IP hosting myself). They suggested to host the site properly instead and offered to refund the redirection fee ($7.99/year) if I do it. It was one more argument against using redirection.Another small problem occurred when half a year later I finally went to the form that changes nameservers for this domain name. It became inoperative for a couple days because the clueless EasySpace cleared its DNS records immediately after the form was submitted, but the requests were still routed to the old nameservers for some time (which was normal: that’s how Internet works). The redirection is now done within my pair.com account (here is .htaccess file that does it).
In 2005, the growth of my collection of Russian anthems forced me to look for a host with cheap bandwidth. MP3 files that generated a lot of traffic (estimated 150 GB/mo) had been staying at the university servers until then. Unfortunately the collection was growing over the disk space allotted for me at my university. Another account was needed for further aditions to the collection. Pair was out of question because of relatively expensive bandwidth prices; the site itself was hosted reliably on pair but MP3s were all delegated to external accounts. I needed to find a reasonable compromise between quality of service and the costs for hosting these MP3s. The first host I tried, WebHostingBoy, while featuring the bottom prices for bandwidth, simply did not work. The server went down for days, and I was also unable to pay them (they didn’t take credit cards directly). So I went looking for a bit less cheap hosts, and found ZestHost, which seemed to work reasonably well for the purpose (it was not of pair’s uptime standard as the dotty uptime records collected over a couple subsequent months showed, but most of the time it was up and working).
2005... registering a .ru domain name! Why, oh why, Russian registrars do not care about the convenience of their customers? They either want you to come to their Moscow office in person to sign the service agreement (I live in St. Petersburg). Or, if you absolutely don’t want to travel to Moscow just to buy a .ru domain name, you can mail them a mandate, bearing your physical signature and notarized by a lawyer (notarization costs more than the domain name first payment; mail takes several days). And yes, no, they don’t take credit cards, for that you’d have actually go to a Russian post office and make money order (or international bank transfer if you have to. Just not credit cards, they don’t handle them). I would probably ditch the idea of getting hymn.ru were it not for a single registrar (out of the grand total of six of them accredited for .ru domains, as of March 2005, tried them all) that did not require all of the above. It was still a small pain in the ass to go through: the interface was cumbersome, I had to call and recite the credit card number to be able to use it on their site, and then I had to call once more just to figure out what’s the next step in the registration process (the emails didn’t say it). After I had paid the annual fee and become their proud customer, I got spammed with “monthly account statements” that were invariably showing the $0.06 remainder on my account, every fucking month... just to keep me informed that I still own this domain name, I suppose :). All this is ridiculous in comparison with a ten-minutes, all-online-fully-automatic, you-won’t-hear-from-us-until-the-next-payment-is-due registration of .com/net/org domains you’d expect from pretty much any registrar today.
Last updated in July 2006
See also: Webmaster FAQ on skazka.no (written by me)


Vadim Makarov
Reader’s Comments
...In a sense, I hope you had a run of bad luck -- in that I hope not many people suffer as much as you have.
I’ve been a bit luckier, but perhaps only because my requirements have been simpler. I’m hosted at pair.com, on their cheapest scheme. What appealed to me about pair.com was the combination of low price and openness about which corner was being cut. It’s phone support. Either they won’t supply it toll-free or perhaps they charge for it -- I forget. Anyway, I didn’t care, because
being in Japan, I knew I wouldn’t want to pay a transpacific phone bill, and
using just ftp, I knew I wouldn’t have any questions to ask. (What should go wrong? "Uh, hello, your server seems to be down." "Yes, we know, we’re working on it." "Um, do you know when it will be up again." "No, sorry, we don’t" [perhaps with the muttered addition "and if it weren’t for idiots like you asking this same old question, we’d fix it much more quickly"].)
A friend is in the software distribution business. He reports that product support is a major drain on the company. One phone call (with an intelligent or stupid question) more than wipes out the profit on that box.
I don’t say that this is a panacea, but it’s worth asking yourself if you need support by phone; and, if the answer is no, looking for a company that openly says it doesn’t offer this support. -- Peter Evans, January 28, 2001 Vadim’s reply: The value of phone support depends on internal organization
of the hosting service. My experience was just opposite of Peter’s:
Tri Star Web
didn’t know that my site was down (which was strange and bad,
but it occurred just a few times).
Whenever I called them, the operator always tried to bring it up instantly,
while I was holding the line, and succeeded most of the time.
...I decided on the basis of your
recommendation to buy hosting from pair.com, even though they were far
from being the cheapest US hosting company.
It is now nearly a week after I bought the hosting online,
and I have yet to have anything other than
computer-generated responses to my emails asking what has happened to my account.
-- Stephen Hemingway (Steve@SteveHemingway.com), April 18, 2001
I have been using pair.com for several years and also recommend them. My aim in having my own domain name was to have the same e-mail address for life. This policy has been vindicated, because the free web-based e-mail I used to use, changed their policy and now charge.
For a cheap and efficient registrar, I recommend Total Registrations (crashes Netscape -VM). -- Martin Kellerman (martin@kellerman.org), March 12, 2002
...I could highly recommend ICDSoft as a web host. The best prices, bandwidth and tech support in the business. I am in no way related to them and am just a customer - but a very very happy one - as most of their customers are. -- Norman D. Letow, NYC, USA, August 17, 2002
Totally free hosting of domain names
I thought it was impossible to get a domain name hosted totally for free. However, it turns out that it is possible. Portland Communications offer this service, and you don’t even have to have an advert on your website. The only drawback is that web sites download slowly.
It’s quite useful for little experimental websites. -- Martin Kellerman (martin@kellerman.org), March 3, 2003 VM’s comment: they don’t include any useful amount of data transfer on their free and low-cost plans. It’s a teaser. As soon as your site has more that a few visitors per day (literally), you’re up to pay for a normally-priced plan.
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Related Links
Web Pages Must Live Forever - one of the principles I adhere to, as you might have inferred from the above
How to Register a Domain Name
Uptime - a free service that regularly checks if your site is reachable and emails you if it’s not. The service is currently provided by good OpenACS folks, and checks your site once every 15 minutes (as of August 2005). Though not 100% perfect and rarely sending false alarms, the number of downtimes reported by it will give you a pretty good indicator of hosting quality if you run Uptime for a month or longer.There are also programs that can run periodical checks from your computer, e.g. Coast tools (sorry, I haven’t bothered to find a free piece of software).Hint: if you use really good managed hosting, you will not need to monitor your site. Well, maybe just for those cases when you screw up someting that affects the site availability, and not notice it :)
Domain name issues - maybe you should also register variations of your domain name
Sam Spade - a set of useful tools (both Web-based and available for download) to dig around domain names and Internet. I recommend that you install a local version on your PC: it’s a nice and educating program. Don’t turn off Tip of the Day.
DNS zone check - useful tool for checking if DNS for your domain name are set up correctly. Just enter your domain name and proceed.For example, the Norwegian domain name authority - NORID - will not accept submitted change of DNS if this check returns errors, short of maybe Delegation inconsistency error. Other domain name authorities are more forgiving, but I’m not sure if it’s good for the user.
Web Hosting Q ‘n’ A - a beginner’s guide to Web hosting issues. -- added by Kamran Rizvi (kamran@alwaiz-arts.com) on April 6, 2002
Web Hosting Tutor - articles, guides, news, glossary and more for the web hosting, domain names and related industry. -- added by Raj (info@hostology.info) on October 24, 2003
Host directories:
Web Hosting Bluebook — several inexpensive hosting plans [раid linк]
The ultimate PPC directory for Web Hosting where there are thousands of businesses listed which provide different web related services or perhaps you would be interested in reading detailed reviews about Cheap Web Hosting. There are many ways you can try to get the right web hosting provider. [yes I am corrupted :) раid linкs end here]
HostSearch
List of Web Hosting Directories
Web Hosting Ratings - directory of web hosting plans, with advanced search options; uptime monitoring; good hosting FAQ, glossary and links section. -- added by Lech Mazur (webmaster@webhostingratings.com) on November 11, 2001
Web Hosting Search - searchable directory of hosts; articles, reviews, spotlights, customer feedback.
FindMyHosting - Web Hosting Marketplace - advertising free, completely focused helping you find the right hosting plan to suit your needs. -- added by Andrew McMaster (hostadmin@findmyhosting.com) on February 26, 2002
BigHosts - directory of only the biggest hosts and networks. -- added by Benjamin Lunsford (bdl@bighosts.com) on June 28, 2002
RateMyHost - web hosting ratings and reviews for web host seekers. -- added by Zak Boca (from RateMyHost) on November 19, 2002
$10 Cheap Web Hosting Directory - searchable database of cheap web hosting plans below $10, free web hosts showcase and reviews of the Top 10 hosts. -- added by James Yap (from 10-cheapwebhosting) on November 29, 2002
BrowseHosts.com - Web Hosting Directory with articles, tips, discussion forums and more to help you make the right choice in web hosting. -- added by Pinny Cohen (pcohen@browsehosts.com) on December 3, 2002
Web Hosting Stuff - a hosting directory that lists and reviews several thousand web hosting plans. -- added by Jennifer (site maintainer; jennifer@w3centric.com) on August 3, 2004
Hosts:
As we all know that finding the right Web Hosting Company and a plan that suits your need can be a tough task if you are looking for detailed selection of Web Hosting companies and reviewing their services in detail then you might want to do a thorough research. Finding the right Web Hosting solution has never been easier. [раid linкs]
Multiple Domain Hosting - Webmasters searching for multiple domain hosting accounts can find some affordable plans outlined overhere. -- added by Kamran Rizvi (kamran@alwaiz-arts.com) on January 18, 2002
Earth First website development and hosting ltd. - supplying quality Web hosting plans to New Zealand. -- added by Allan Hall (from Earth First) on July 30, 2002
Richardson Technologies - small business web hosting solutions. -- added on September 14, 2002
Servers On Demand - for those wanting dedicated servers or multiple domain web hosting, a solid option. -- added by Putra Bridge (putra@sod.net) on September 30, 2002
Web-site-hosting-n-tools - affordable web hosting, marketing, optimization tips and design software, for personal web pages or e-commerce hosting solutions. -- added by David Johnson on December 12, 2002
Bulix - cheap host. Cheap. Allows reselling. -- added by LuboD (lubod@extreme-hosting.net) on October 13, 2003
I’m sorry but I no longer accept links to individual web hosts. I’m in no position to turn this page into a directory.I do not accept links to hosting directories. Requests to add a link to directory, plans comparison, etc. are routinely deleted from my inbox.Add a link (have you read the two lines above?)