Selecting a Web Host Provider
We examined both the benefits and drawbacks for "FREE" and "PAY" packages offered by Web Hosting Providers that individually, each of us had
used to post class assignments on in the past. Our research process was focused upon certain features available with various Web Host providers that we collectively considered to be a requirement, in terms that were influenced by the express parameters for this “Team Project” assignment. As a result, features such as the availability of “Building Tools”, “Blogs”, E-mail” or “Microsoft FrontPage” Extensions and service support (which even Microsoft plans to abandon after June, 2008) have not been addressed, nor were a factor in our overall selection process.
Instead, the selection process was based upon the availability or exclusion of certain features that would ultimately, provide the rationale behind our selection of “Tripod Free”, as our Web Hosting Provider. The determinative features that we considered to be essential requirements to publish our Team Project website and, which made for a relatively quick and easy, collective decision to use Tripod includes the following:
Advertisements
Most free Web Hosting Providers impose advertisements on a free website to cover the costs of providing web space and other associated services.
Banner Ads are placed on the top and bottom of each individual web page or “Pop-Up” windows are displayed every time a web page
on a site loads. In terms of web page layout, a web designer must then always remember to format extra space for an advertising frame, especially,
when “Inline Frames” with individual content pages are used in a website. Some of our Team Members had experienced this tedious, trial-and-error process entails setting the offset for the left, right, top and bottom sides of the screen when attempting to position “pop-ups” incorporated into your own site to, for example, display a full-size version of a graphic image in its own window.
The Free web hosting package for both Yahoo! GeoCities Free and Tripod Free do impose a requirement that members host ads on their web pages, formatted by the inclusion of a separate “index.html” document inserted by each provider. After review of the Banner Ad size and placement at both the top and bottom within each site web page, along with, the presence of only a few "pop-up" windows per page load, we collectively agreed that such advertisements were only a minor distraction, but an acceptable nuisance for our purposes.
Disk Storage Space
When a website consists of text, multiple graphic images, sound files, or video files, there of course must be sufficient disk storage available from a Web Host Provider. Obviously, a web designer must be conscious of file size, which is largely determined by how many graphic images per page are used, and whether there is a need for multiple multimedia files, including sound files or video clips, etc. In turn, if considerable additions to a website are envisioned, the needs that future expansion will demand must be weighed to meet a website's storage size needs.
Yahoo! GeoCities Free offers up to 15MB of free disk space, while Tripod Free grants up to 20MB of storage. Nonetheless, if the “Free” space allotment is exceeded, a member must purchase additional disk space. “Freewebs”, a rather large and robust free web service that claims to host over seventeen million websites, offers 40MB for disk storage. Once again, the entry-level package from Bluehost far out-stripped the “Free” packages by a substantial margin by offering 300GB of disk storage space. Still, the storage space provided by a “Free” host would be sufficient to complete our Team Project and support the small amount of traffic generated by any classmate visitors
Bandwidth Allotment
Most free Web Hosting Providers impose a limit on the amount of traffic a website can use per day or per month. If the web pages (and graphic images) on a site are loaded by visitors beyond a certain number of times per day (or per month), the web host may disable your web site, or perhaps, just send you a bill.
As explained within the Yahoo! GeoCities Free package details;
Whenever a visitor comes to a website, data is sent from our web servers to your visitor's computer. This data can be composed of web pages, images, movies, sound files, programs, compressed files, or anything else on your site that can be viewed or downloaded by visitors. When all this requested data is added up, then you have your total data transfer. The more visitors you have, the higher a data transfer limit you'll need. You can always buy additional data transfer as your site grows.
The majority of hosting services that we discovered during our research process offer anywhere between 250GB-to-350GB of bandwidth, which, at first glance, seems to be more than adequate. Though, if you do the math that is somewhere around 100,000,000 page views in total, assuming an average web page size of approximately 30KB.
In general, it is recommended that approximately 100MB of traffic per month is too little for anything other than a “Personal Home Page” website, while about 1-to-3 GBs per month is usually adequate to meet the traffic generated by just a simple website, such as our Team Project website.
Yahoo! GeoCities Free offers up to 3GB per Month (Metered Hourly), while Tripod Free grants members only 1GB per Month. Freewebs will provide 500MB of bandwidth per Month on its “Free” package. Yet, even this amount pales in comparison to the entry-level package from Bluehost allows 3TB (3000GB) which would more than fulfill the requirements for our Team Project website.
Moreover, now the related question of how many “Domains” will a Web Hosting Provider allow a member to host on a single account, comes into play, since having multiple sites on one account will allow you to get the most out of any excess bandwidth. Again, Bluehost had the most attractive package, which actually allows a member an unlimited number of Domains, per single account. Notwithstanding, our positive individual experiences using a “Free” Web Host Provider for publishing class assignments on the web in the past, left us confident that such an arrangement would adequately
fulfill our requirements to host this Team Project.
FTP Account Access
Some free Web Hosting Providers only allow you to design your page with their “Online Builder”. “Weebly” allows prospective members to do a “live demo” where you can test various features while building an entire website, all features before you even sign up for an account. For our Team Projects, it will be important then to assure that the option to build our own website and upload the accompanying web pages and other files is available, with at the very least, an FTP (File Transfer Protocol) access feature to upload our website page files and graphic images.
Yahoo! GeoCities Free and Tripod Free offer a “File Manager” to create, edit, copy, rename, and delete HTML files, as well as, to see your disk space usage and website statistics. Similarly, the entry-level package from Bluehost has a “Drag-and-Drop Site Builder“ and a “File Manager” to upload or delete files within individual web folders, or manage a site with their “AWStats” visual usage tracker and “Web-Analyzer Statistics” statistical indicator. With any of these packages, the availability of FTP provides a convenient and relatively simple method to transfer files in-and-out of a web site directory.
Reliability and Speed of Access
A website that is frequently “down” will lose a lot of visitors. Similarly, slow download time for a website is also very frustrating for visitors. As recommended, we have individually checked and compared our own website hosted by either Yahoo! GeoCities Free or Tripod Free during both so-called “peak” hours and “non-peak” hours for web traffic.
In this regard, we found their individual reliability and speed to be indistinguishable from each other, that is to say, wholly adequate. In turn, a cursory search through a number of “Rank-Review” comparison sites exhibited that three Web Hosting Providers were on, or near the top, of each list we reviewed for overall reliability and service satisfaction -- “StartLogic”, “Lunarpages”, and “Bluehost”.
Online Technical Support
Inevitably, glitches will arise that may require contact with the Web Hosting Provider's “Help Desk” in order to resolve issues that prevent either the access to edit or display a website. Given the time constraints for this Team Project assignment, if “help” is required, immediate attention to resolve any technical issues with our Web Host Provider may be vital in order to ensure our assignments are completed in a timely manner.
Yahoo! GeoCities Free and Tripod Free offer an extensive online “Help” area to obtain instructions and answers to questions frequently asked by members. Tutorials and explanations for package features or even details about FTP file transfer are also available. However, access to “live” online customer support or service representatives are offered only with “pay packages” like the entry-level package from Bluehost, which offers 24/7 help technician availability.
Notwithstanding, after our short, five-minute experience to complete the “Signup” process to register an Account with Tripod, along with, the ease with which files were uploaded to the comprehensive, and well-designed File Manager area thereafter, we were left with a sense of confidence that we would not require much technical assistance from their Help Desk to complete our Team Project.
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