One thing I've become is very aware of difference between a good host and a bad host. To put it simply (and obviously) a good host makes it easy for you to create and maintain your web site. A bad host gets in way and makes you angry, unhappy and gives you an ulcer.

The key point to remember when evaluating hosts is most important quality is responsiveness - of your site and support people. Your site should be up virtually all of time (unfortunately computer crashes do happen but they should be rare and far between) and it must be fast. In addition, all good hosts react in a timely manner to support issues and questions. You can tell when a host is going bad from failure of these key areas - unresponsive technical support, slow servers or constant downtime.

This article is intended as a kind of checklist - what is essential, essential if you need it, optional and not important at all? Look it over, then when you go to find a good host pull out article and make sure it measures up.

Essential Qualities

There are a few attributes which are common to all good hosts.

Reasonable support - This is something you won't know until you've started using a web host and hopefully you will not need much support. However, when you have a question, concern or problem, it's essential that you have a way to contact support staff. Just as important is handling of issue needs to be fast and efficient. I wouldn't insist on a phone number, but an email or form interface with quick responses is essential.

Even if you don't have any particular reason to contact support, it's a good idea to send off a message occasionally just to see if they are on ball.

Access to control panel - You should not use a host unless it gives you access to a well defined control panel. What does this do for you? It allows you to control features of your web site (account) from your web browser. For example, using menu you should be able to upload files, protect directories, add autoresponders and so on.

Excellent automation - This is perhaps one of more important features of a good host. Automation. You should be able to access everything you want from a well designed menu and do virtually anything without involving a human being.

Control of creating protected directories - Sometimes it doesn't seem important, but sooner or later you will almost certainly want to create a protected directory. This is a directory (or folder) on your web site which requires a username and password. Any good web host will allow you to do this directly from your account menu.

Error pages - I would not host my site anywhere I could not create my own 401, 403 and 404 errors pages. I like idea of letting visitors know in a nice way when there is a problem. The better hosts allow these files to be maintained from control panel, although some simply allow you to edit your .htaccess file directly.

Reasonable performance - A web site must load quickly. It's hard enough to get page sizes down to point where they load reasonably quickly without your web host slowing things down.

So far I haven't found a single hosting company that even comes close. I've tried about a dozen different firms, and they've all come up short. In fact, most important rule of any web host is violated on a regular basis time and again. The sites are down and very slow. Virtually anything else can be tolerated, except for downtime.

Finally I sat back one day and thought long and hard about my options. I was getting very frustrated with my current hosting company because server was timing out on occasion, causing my sites to become unavailable for a few minutes here and a few minutes there.

I started looking for hosts and saw a word that caught my eye. The word was "dedicated". Now that was a thought - a whole machine all to myself. There was some appeal to that thought, but price was too high, or at least I thought so at time.

Looking closer into concept, I found a dedicated hosting service that was actually reasonably priced. For a couple of hundred dollars a month I had a web and mail server all to myself. Yes, I know that sounds high when compared to a shared hosting service, but remember this included an incredible amount of bandwidth, lots of disk space and plenty of power.

I paid for first month and soon discovered server had it's own name server software. This meant I no longer had to deal with an ISP for name server services.

What's so good about that? Well, as an example, some time ago I wanted to install Bigmailbox on a site. This would have allowed my visitors to have a mailbox named "theirname@renaissancefaire.org". I thought this would be a pretty cool service to offer my visitors.

The ISP would not make change necessary to install this feature. The change requires about 1 minute, yet they would not do it. Not even for a charge. With access to my own name server I could have made this change myself. It's very simple really. Just a one line modification.

Another thing I wanted to do on occasion is create subdomains. For example, wallpaper.renaissancefaire.org. This would allow me to create sites within sites in a logical, easy to remember format.