Before we dive right into setting up a hosting account, here are a few key features to look for when selecting a web hosting company. These are the criteria we consider when selecting hosts for our own companies. Yes, there are a lot of technical facts here. No, you don't need to memorize them all. A quick overview to let you know what really goes into picking a web host will be helpful... it is definitely not a case of just picking the host with the lowest cost and the biggest file space
- Linux, not Windows: Almost all of the popular, stable, open-source projects today got started on the LAMP platform (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP). There's nothing like a bit of name-dropping, so let's name a few...
- One server for the web pages and the database: The Apache web server and the MySQL database server should reside on the same machine. Now there are instances when you want these to be separate... when you actually own both machines and they are physically no further apart than one Ethernet hub connecting the two. That, as you may suspect, is not the situation with the majority of the websites online today. Most are on shared hosting accounts. When you're planning a site that will be using a content management system like Drupal, every page viewed, every request from a site visitor, will result in multiple calls from the web server to the database server. If these two are on separate machines, then your website will be s. l. o. w. and especially slow during busier times.
- Apache's mod_rewrite module: It is essential that the dyamic website we're about to install have the ability to display clean urls. Putting an a web pages's key words in the URL (web address) is one of the hot spots when it comes to getting a search engine to index your page properly. And you do want your site to get noticed, don't you? For this to happen, we need the ability to rewrite the URLs.
- SSH, also known as a Secure Shell and used by the SFTP protocol. "Regular" FTP is what most web hosts will give you so that you can log in and upload files to your website. Here's the problem... when you log in to your FTP account, that precious password that controls access to all your website's files is being sent across the web, over multiple computers, IN PLAIN TEXT that can be read by any hacker with the desire to do so. This is NOT an option if the stuff you're going to be storing on your website is of any significant value to you.
- Scheduled Tasks: Your web host should have the ability to let you set and configure CRON jobs (what scheduled tasks are called in Linux). We'll be making good use of these for automated site maintenance tasks such as..
- The Right Extensions for PHP. Amazingly, some web hosting companies (Earthlink for example) use extensions like PHP4 and PHP5, and you need to use those extensions for the server to recognize that what you've just uploaded is a script. That's all well and good, IF you're going to be writing your own web applications from scratch. BUT if you're planning on using one of the many highly valuable pieces of software like those mentioned above, then the file extension recognized as a script needs to be .php
- Unlimited Parked and Add-On Domains: This is the feature that allows you to point more than one registered domain name to the same hosting account. A parked domain may either point at the same content (a bad idea, which we'll get into later) or be re-directed to another address. An add-on domain points to a sub-folder in your existing hosting account, and can serve a completely different set of files, and thus be an independent and distinct website.
- Unlimited Subdomains: A subdomain is another word tacked on to the beginning of your domain name. For instance, if your domain were example.com then you might have subdomains such as blogs.example.com and shopping.example.com and so on. Each subdomain may have completely different content from your main site. What's particularly handy about subdomains is that they do not require you to register a new domain. Add a subdomain and you can start building a new site, and register the domain name when you're ready to take it online. You can also create subdomains to target specific audiences.
- Unlimited email accounts: Add as many email accounts to your domain as you like. Incoming mail might be re-routed to ONE address for easy reading, or organized into multiple and completely separate accounts managed by different individuals. You might be thinking to yourself, "Why do I need more than one email account?". There are a number of reasons.
- A professional appearance. When you're corresponding with potential clients, which of these do you think will look better? yourname@gmail.com or admin@example.com? yourname@yahoo.com or support@example.com?
- A legitimate appearance to anti-spam bots. When your domain gets "tested" for legitimacy, the existence of certain accounts is crucial. For example, you will want, at a minimum, postmaster@example.com, abuse@example.com, webmaster@example.com, noreply@example.com
- Marketing - when you've got marketing campaigns that require people to respond to a specific email address, it's easier to track which campaign is getting the best results by setting up separate addresses for each.
So then, your domain name is registered, and you're all ready to set up a hosting account. Without further ado, we present to you our favorite web hosting service, used to host our own sites and those of numerous clients. Do your hosting here and you'll have an added benefit... future step-by-step lessons on Drupal and website management using tools like cPanel and phpMyAdmin will all have screen shots with big red arrows telling you where to click and where to type... and all those screen shots will be using (you guessed it) HostGator's implementation of cPanel and phpMyAdmin.
The button below is our preferred company. We're not only recommending them, we've got numerous websites hosted there, and have always found their technical support staff to be extremely courteous and helpful, even when dealing with some of our highly-technical software-engineering questions...
