By :
Elijah James
As you learn how to make a website, one of the major decisions you'll face is where to host your site. There are hundreds of web-hosting services available, each touting themselves as the "best." The decision becomes even more confusing by the dozens of sites proclaiming the "Top 10 Web-Hosts." The truth is, most of those "top 10" lists are simply composed of the companies that were willing to pay for the listing.So how do you decide? Well, the first step is to determine what kind of hosting you need. Obviously, for large-scale websites, you'll need large-scale hosting. For a small, personal website, very basic hosting is all you'll really need.Every developer will likely have their favored hosting company, and you'll need to see what work best for you. From personal experience though, here are some options to meet a wide range of hosting needs.Small-Scale Hosting: BluehostBluehost is a good, inexpensive solution for small, personal websites. Hosting starts at a very low monthly rate, and offers unlimited disk storage, unlimited bandwidth, and unlimited hosted and parked domains. It also comes with a pretty decent drag-and-drop web-based website editor. Bluehost provides a whopping 100 MySQL databases, 1,000 FTP accounts, and an outstanding 2,500 email addresses.Installation of Bluehost content management tools is a quick, one-click affair. Though some folks have found Bluehost customer support to be rough, what you get for the price is pretty good overall. It is an effective, cost-efficient option for a small-scale, personal website.Mid-Range Hosting: LinodeLinode provides high-quality VPS hosting, and is an excellent mid-range hosting solution. While they tout the "Linode Cloud," they do not really provide cloud hosting; rather, they offer an excellent VPS (Virtual Private Server) platform, with fantastic speed and great flexibility.The Linode Manager allows you to do just about anything, from creating disk partitions to setting up private networking, and everything in between. The Linode corporation has four centers in the US, one in Europe, and has recently opened a new center in Japan.Keep in mind that while Linode is excellent for mid-range sites, their prices are simply too expensive for a larger VPS.Large Scale Hosting: RackspaceRackspace was founded in 1998, and has grown to serve over 161,000 customers. They have built their company on fanatical customer support and excellent service. Down-time is extremely rare with Rackspace, as they have techs on hand nearly 24/7.For a large company that needs reliable, effective, cost-efficient hosting, Rackspace is the way to go. Their prices are definitely on the higher end of the scale, but that's because they specifically cater to the needs of large-scale websites.
![[Valid RSS feed]](http://www.nextlevelarticles.com/images/icon_Rss.png "XML Feed For RSS"){kind=icon}
Category Rss Feed
Print This Article
Add To Favorites
