Webmentor's How To Guides

Webmentor's How To Guides are written in plain english so that ordinary business folk can understand important stuff about their websites.

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Webmentor's Webhosting Tables

Compare Irish Web Hosts in an easy to read table. Vote and leave a comment, or read what others have to say. Take me to the Webhosting Tables.

What to look for in a good web host

If you want to get straight to it, you can compare the features and prices of Irish business web hosting packages in Webmentor's Irish Web Hosting Table. All the packages listed are Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP ("LAMP") shared server offerings with at least 1 MySQL database.

After years of evaluating web hosting services I'd put my own order of priorities as follows:

  1. Support
  2. Reliability
  3. Features I Need
  4. Price
  5. Features not worth paying for

Support is a priority even when you (think you) know what you're doing

I want decent phone support and I don't mind paying a bit extra for it (like up to €70/y). Why? Two reasons:

  1. Honestly? It's just too difficult to explain a problem using email when you don't fully understand it yourself
  2. I want to understand what went wrong and how I can prevent it in the future

To accomplish either of these goals requires talking to a live person. Also, my willingness to learn about the problem saves them having to support me in the future.

Reliability

This one is also a key requirement and you can't appreciate it fully until you have clients screaming at you down the phone that their website has been down all weekend and is down, again, for the second time this week.

If your web host here in Ireland is reselling for someone else - then what can they do about disaster recovery except wait for the parent company to respond? Between 2010-11 two major reputable Irish webhosts with backbone infrastructure in Ireland took weeks to recover from unforeseen disasters causing absolute mayhem for their clients. The level of support I received on behalf of one client while this disaster was going on was minimal, and let me say it: on the point of denial there was even a problem. (And it wasn't a cheap shared hosting offering either, it was a VPS.)

Uptime is the key to Reliability

Most web hosts advertise their "stated uptime". This is not a guarantee. And just to be clear: getting money back for downtime on a shared hosting set up is rare as hen's teeth.

  • 99.5% stated uptime - means an average 3.5 hours downtime per month
  • 99.9% stated uptime - means an average 40 minutes downtime per month

Find out how to reliably measure uptime

Look at the stated uptime figures very carefully. When the server is down all your services are down too - not just your website. During downtime you're not getting emails either - they're bouncing right back to the sender.

Stated uptime is a loaded phrase. It means that the provider decides the criteria on which their uptime is measured and stated. It could mean that maintenance or downtime shorter than 10 minutes is ignored when calculating uptime!

The only reliable way to measure uptime

Unfortunately you won't find figures anywhere for Irish Webhosts that publish their true uptime. The only way to do it is to monitor your own website with one of the providers below. They will test your website every 5 minutes and send you a report on your actual monthly uptime.

Features I Need

Of course this depends on your situation. There are basic features like space and bandwidth listed on Webmentor's webhosting tables and there are more technical features that you/your developer wants in order to build and maintain a website and provide for any other services like email. 

Basic features

  • Space (allow 50% for expansion)
  • Bandwidth (GB/mo) - how to calculate your average monthly bandwidth

    Let's say your website has an average 50 visitors per day, each viewing an average of 3.5 pages, each page averaging 120kB (you can get these stats from Analytics)
    50 x 3.5 x 120 = 21000kB/day
    You also have a number of PDF files (average size 200kB) downloaded on average 8 times per day.
    (8 x 200) = 1600 kB/day
    Add up the totals and multiply by 31 days, and multiply by an error factor of 1.5 for safety (increase to 2 if you're not sure). Divide by 1000000 to get minimum required monthly bandwidth (GB/mo)
    (21000 + 1600) x 31 x 1.5 / 1000000 = 1.05GB/mo
    So allowing for email and FTP which also gobbles up bandwidth, you should be real comfortable here with a host offering 5-10GB/mo bandwidth.

  • Email - POP3 and IMAP - as many as you need
  • Basic spam filtering for email
  • Access to web host's backup (even if paid)

Technical features

  • Decent Fully Featured Control Panel (eg CPanel, HSphere, Plesk) - not a cut down crippled version of same
  • Set up databases, at least 1 MySQL database
  • Ability to run Cron jobs for automated scripts
  • Change A, CNAME and MX records
  • PHP5 and MySQL5 (not version 4 for either)
  • Other really technical features like ssh admin, sFTP, support for CURL and/or fsockopen, etc, depending on your needs.

Price

Irish web hosts have become very competitive over the years. One look at the Webhosting Tables will tell you that you can get shared web hosting dirt cheap these days.

That's why price is in lowly fourth position - as long as it's less than €70/y I'm willing to look at them.

Features not worth paying for

I'll divide these into 2 types - overadvertising features that should be there anyway, and avoiding features that you might regret later on.

Marketing overkill

You know what I mean - like a car manufacturer bursting with pride that the car has FOUR wheels like that's something special. Here's a list that would qualify in the web hosting arena:

  • Free FTP accounts (doh? how else am i supposed to upload files to your server?)
  • Free Control Panel (doh? how else am i supposed to create email accounts, databases etc?)
  • Free statistics (doh? available in my free Control Panel right?)
  • Free Admin account (doh? how else am i supposed to pay your fees?)
  • Free Templates/Shopping Carts/Script installers (doh? they're all free anyway)
  • 100% satisfaction guarantee (doh? human beings are never bloody satisfied...)

Avoid these like the plague

  • Create your own website software (read a salutary tale)

    A friend of mine went ahead with one of these and created a pretty decent looking site. After some months he rang me and asked why it still wasn't showing up in google. One look and I realised what the problem was. The entire site had been created in Flash. It's a common application used for dummy-proof site builders. It's also pretty much inaccessible to Google - hence, no search engine results.

  • Submit your site to a gazillion search engines (Just don't. Google will find your site and the gazillion others will find Google).