John Hok dot Com

I wanted to just list some basic “street sense” info for people looking to purchase domains and hosting. The industry can be a confusing one for newcomers but being around and having to deal extensively with domains and hosting for my own sites; I’ve slowly grown a vast knowledge of the confusing industry.

One of the worst mistakes you can make while purchasing a domain is getting it from the same company as your host. You never want to do this because if you cancel your hosting, sometimes you can have problems transferring your domain out. To put it frankly, the hosting company has the power to hold your valuable domain hostage. So ALWAYS go with a 3rd party domain registar.

Some of the biggest and most reputable places for domains are GoDaddy and Namecheap. You should just about ignore any other company as these two will basically fulfill all your needs.

For purchasing hosting, first you want to ask yourself how much space you need and how much visitors do you think you will get. Think up of a rough idea and figure out what options you need like PHP or mySQL. If you already have a host in mind, always do a “background check” on them by finding reviews of the company by previous customers. The best place to look for reputable reviews is WebHostingTalk. Try to avoid those top 10 host sites because they tend to all be fake. Usually forums are a better place to look for reviews as usually customers go to forums to post their real experiences.

Also in the hosting industry you should get familiar with some terms.
Shared - This means that you are sharing 1 server with probably over a hundred other customers. This might seem a lot but if your with a good host they will know how to manage the server so there won’t be many problems. Servers are built to be powerful and can usually handle these big numbers unless you are with a host that is incompetent. Usually for shared hosting, the company is responsible for all the support and mangement of the server.

Reseller - This means that you are also sharing 1 server with a bunch of other customers and possibly even more than with shared hosting. This is because with reseller hosting you have the ability to re-sell your resources. Basically you can act as your own hosting company. Be wary though, usually reseller servers tend to be more packed so you don’t get as many resources as say a shared hosting package.

Dedicated - Dedicated servers are servers that are dedicated to JUST you and nobody else. You get to use all the resources on the server which is good if you have a very high traffic site but the tradeoff to this is, it usually costs more and most of the times you have to manage the server yourself. This can be confusing if you don’t know much about linux. Most companies will offer server management as well at an extra price.

VPS(Virtual Private Server) - A VPS is a term used to describe 1 very powerful server which is basically seperated into a handful of other small “virtual” servers. Basically you are given your own “dedicated” server but not as powerful as an actual dedicated server. VPS accounts are entirely isolated from each other. So lets say “Customer A” has a site that is getting too many hits for his account and it causes his account to crash. All other customers on the VPS will not be affected by Customer A. This is good for sites that are growing rapidly and this is a step below fully dedicated server. Usually VPS are managed by the host itself and the price is quite affordable.

To wrap this up some hosting companies that I would recommend is HostingZoom for shared hosting, ResellerZoom for reseller hosting, PowerVPS for vps hosting, and SoftLayer for dedicated hosting.

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