There are a lot of things to consider when choosing a web hosting company.
But one thing for sure is that price is no longer
important. Web hosting is a very competitive field so the price just
keeps getting lower and lower. It is so easy to find cheap web hosting for
PHP and MySQL
The important things to consider when choosing PHP and MySQL web hosting
are :
- PHP and MySQL versions
If a web hosting company say that they support PHP 4 make sure it's the latest
version not the 4.0.1 version. Same thing for MySQL but with an extra precaution.
Some webhosting companty only support MyISAM tables, so if you need InnoDB
make sure you ask if it's available.
- Specific setting / feature
For example, you want to create a PHP script which change a file's permission
using chmod(). Guess what, if PHP is run as
the server your code won't work and there is nothing you can do about it.
This exact thing happen to me with this website. I didn't foresee that i
would make such application. Anyway just try imagining what you want to do
with your web site and if you are uncertain whether a web host will support
a feature, just ask.
- Connection speed
All web hosting company claim that they have fast connection speed, but you
have to test it to believe it. Use NetMechanic's
free service to test the web host company's homepage. If the result is good then
the claim is most likely true.
- Data transfer
When you just started a website it doesn't matter much. But as your website
grows you have to make sure you have enough bandwidth. One or two gigabytes
(Gb) per month is more than enough for most web sites
- Access to raw log file and online statistics (log file analyzer)
If you are serious in building a website, for commercial purposes for example,
this is very critical. You can discover a lot of information from log files
like the keywords used to find your website, most visited pages, peak times
etc.
- Storage space
Measure your own website, start small but leave room for expansion. For a
small website 15 megabytes is plenty.
- Customer support
They have to be there when you need them, period. Try asking some questions
before you decide to go with a hosting company. If it takes more than 24
hours for them to reply then find another host.
|
For those of you who just want to experiment you can use MySQL PHP free
hosting. There are probably hundreds of them out there, you just
need to pick one. They usually place banners or other kinds of
advertising on you web page and most are slow. Anyway you can't
expect much from free services.
Actually even if you just experimenting with PHP and MySQL it's better to
have you own web site. Free hosting usually have lots of restriction so you
really can't do much experiment like opening a socket connection and stuff
like that.
There's this one website that rank ten PHP
MySQL website hosting company based on price, quality, performance and
features. If you need a second opinion you can go there.
A bit off topic here. If you intend to build an e-business (for yourself
or for a client) instead of just a website you should consider about Site
Build It. It's an all-in-one site-building, site-hosting, and site-marketing
service. It even outperformed Microsoft's bCentral and Yahoo Web Hosting Pro.
The only drawback is that the HTML templates provided look a bit lame. But
since now you can upload your own template i guess it's not a big deal anymore.