Part 4: In Search Of Shelter
Tempate? Check. Content? Check. Well, partially. After finalising the preliminary setups, it's time to move forward. What next? Getting my site into the internet, of course! Now here comes the difficult part. Which hoster deserve my money? There are thousands out there. Hmm.. Let me see my requirements. My targeted traffic mainly focused from Malaysia. Thus, fast upload and download are necessary. Should I subscribe internationally? Well, why not? But through my experiences, international servers load quite slow down here. I hate to say this, but the current 1Mbps speed is not something that I can be proud of.
But wait. Why paid hosting? Isn’t free hosting is more than enough for personal website. Well, this is partially true. The first reason is, I am not used to the layout, customization, templates, and other services offered by free web hosting sites. However, the biggest drawback is--irritating banner ads.
The banner advertisement is, in fact, how free hosting companies stay in business -- advertisers pay to have their ads listed on every page. Hey, it’s better if I move towards it for my own site. Yeah, it takes hell lot of time but it worth the effort in the long term.
More importantly, I have full control over my site. Free web hosting companies do not allow much in the way of customization, and so inserting HTML, CSS and/or script code won’t work in their services. In the end, if you weigh the pros and cons of free and paid web hosting services, you’ll agree with my decision, which for around 30 cents/day I get so much more than a free service can offer.
Afraid not. Switching from free hosting to paid hosting doesn’t have to be a large effort and it can be in fact a lot of fun. Unless I am extremely rich, I’ll go for dedicated hosting--still, I find it not necessary.
I used to subscribe European server, specifically Germany. Feedbacks I got from international forumers were, "damn fast loading website!". However, it sucks down here--thanks to Streamyx. Nonetheless, it's better than dial-up modem. Sigh. Anyway, I learnt my lesson--choose your targeted traffic. There's no need to sign-up with international plan if your targeted traffics mainly from Malaysia. Of course, they offer better deals but don't waste your money by sacrificing your satisfaction.
So, local hosting companies, here I come. Again, I find myself at the crosspath. Which one to choose? Luckily I'm not a CPanel's fan so bye-bye. There goes my requirement. What I need is DirectAdmin, the simplest yet the easiest control panel provided. How you choose a hosting plan is subjective but my requirements are simple. They bundled DirectAdmin as the control panel, reasonable bandwidth/disk space, lightning fast upload/download, responsive support, reliable, and...cheap! Finally, I made my decision and the money goes to...icore.com.my! Well, this is my experience so don't treat it as a professional review. I am not an expert.
Once initial 'testings' were done, it's time to make the payment. I was contacted about two hours after the payment was made. Hooray! Finally I have successfully rent a shelter for my website. Wait...wait...Save all those cheers for tomorrow. First thing first, I need to point the DNS to my host. Next thing to do is, get my host settings right. Luckily, I'm quite familiar with DirectAdmin so tweaking is a breeze. Once everything in order, time to upload the files.
Here are some tips which worth sharing:
"...in order to utilize 1,000 GB of disk space with the plan offered, a customer must upload a minimum of 100,000 files of 10 MB or less, not to mention the fact that many media and flash files can be much larger than 10 MB, which means those files cannot be hosted at all."
"Basically, if the host feels that any customer's website is costing them more money in disk space than the amount that customer pays, they can close the account or force a costly upgrade. The big question is what kind of disk space do they consider excessive, 1 GB, 5 GB, 10 GB, etc.? Do you really get 1,000 GB of disk space, or is it only a marketing ploy to get new business?"
"...it is very tempting to sign up with a web host that offers many Gigabytes of disk space, Terabytes of monthly bandwidth and unlimited domains. Specially if they charge $5,95 monthly for those specifications The only problem is that those hosting providers are clearly overselling, and thus they are not able to guarantee service quality. When choosing a web host look for a company that offers reasonable specifications."
"It is a maths game, you can’t have fast and reliable servers if you offer terabytes of bandwitdh for a couple of dollars monthly."
"...before signing up make sure that you send some emails to the sales support. Check how fast they answer, how friendly they are and what degree of technical knowledge the operators have. If a company has a poor customer care department to begin with its very likely that other parts of the business will have the same performance."
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"I'm Assad. A commoner who designed and operate this website.