With some 10.000 visitors a months, the European INETA website is not a hugely popular site. One reason could be that the content on the site is not very dynamic.
Setting up a website these days is very easy. First, you think of a cool domain name. Ok, that may not be as easy as it seems, because most of the really cool names are long gone. Did you know that a country like the Netherlands has over 3 million domain names registered. Also, this country has registered the second most .eu names, almost 400.000 as per today. Only the Germans are more fond of .eu-TLD. With over 100 million registered names for the popular TLDs like .com, .net and .org finding a good spot for your site takes some creativity, but there's always room for one more.
After deciding on and registering your domain name, there's the hosting question. Where to host the site? With so many hosting companies in the world, comparing them all and selecting the right one can be a challenge. I will not endorse a certain company, because there are many out there and since I have my own, I have limited experience with them. Some things I would look for in a hoster is:
- technology support - obviously, the hoster should be able to offer ASP.NET as a platform to host your site. Unless you're building PHP-sites of course, but you would not have much interest in the European .NET community if you are a hardcore PHP developer, right? Make sure the latest version is supported, and preferably check the database offer as well. SQL Server 2005 or for the innovative hosters SQL Server 2008 should be a default and not 'special order'.
- history - hosting companies may come and go, but I would say the good ones have a longer history. That doesn't mean a start up should not get a chance, but the fact is that the hosting business has a pretty low threshold. Numerous hosting companies start out in the basement on a single machine or some reseller account. That's ok if you do not care about uptime, speed and you are personally making back-ups. But if you do consider those things important, not all companies can provide you with the best of service. An older company has also proven itself to survive during both good as well as bad times.
- reviews - an additional advantage of having a hoster with a longer history is you can look up their reputation. Sites like webhostinggeeks.com and www.webhostmagazine.com present you with all sorts of reviews. But I'm always a bit sceptical about organized reviewsites. You never know if there's not a company sponsoring the content. And even with the independent sites these days reviews are manufactured. So if you find a hoster that seems ok to you, just search for good and bad experiences. If you don't find too many bad experiences, it should be ok.
Make sure you set up the registrants e-mail to an address that is reliable. If you cannot manage the domain for whatever reason, with the proper e-mail address set for the registrant, you can move the domain to another registrar. For instance, if you registered the domain name ilikethiscooldomainname.com, don't set up the registrants e-mail address to info@ilikethiscooldomainname.com because if you no longer have access to the mailbox on this domain name, it may be difficult to move the domain to another registrar.
What about price? That's a difficult issue, because it's a matter of efficiency and scale whether or not a low price is good or at least good enough. If you want phone support, you can imagine that with a 2 euro/month offer, you will not likely be called back. Staying on the phone with you for 15 minutes cuts into the profit margin. Lower pricing usually means sharing hardware. Given the fixed cost of hardware, a lower price can be achieved by running more sites on a single machine. That can hurt performance. If possible, ask for hardware specs and number of sites hosted on a box.
Then there's the matter of unlimited traffic. Technically, unlimited traffic is impossible because there's no such thing as unlimited bandwidth. You're always bound to the uplink, be it 10Mbit/sec or 10Gbit/sec. With a 100Mbit/sec uplink a site could burn roughly 33 terabytes of traffic a month. I suspect you will get a message from your hoster if you burn network traffic like that for a 5 euro/month subscription. It could be unmetered, but that's a different story. Unmetered means that the hoster doesn't care how much you use. But you will still be limited to the uplink speed and more often than not, you're not alone using that uplink. So while in theory you could use up to 33 TB/month, in practice it's a lot less. Also, look at the fine print and see if there's not a 'fair use policy' described somewhere. And watch out for those unlimited traffic offers, because sharing the uplink with a bunch of others may eat up the speed of your site.
Back to the INETA Europe site! Because we're certainly not generating terabytes of traffic. It's not the hoster or domain name that generates traffic but Content (with a capital C). Keeping a site up to date usually takes time. Alternatively, there are content feeds, like atom or rss, to make a site more lively. And we've done just that. The homepage now presents a list of upcoming events in Europe, courtesy of developerFusion. The best thing about the feed is that it's easily filtered for regions, like Europe, France, Netherlands etcetera. So, if you are a user group leader and want to get the word about your upcoming event out there, make sure you add it here. It will automatically be visible on the INETA Europe website.
Sorry for the long fist post on this blog, and I didn't even introduce myself. Oh well, you can look me up. It's doesn't say I'm the VP Technology for INETA Europe, but I am. As such, I support the infrastructure for INETA Europe with e-mail and hosting. VP Technology is a nice title, but in reality, I'm just the helpdesk guy. 
Posted
Nov 03 2008, 01:55 PM
by
Sander