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Which Comes First, Web Hosting Or Web Design?

March 17th, 2009

What is the relationship between Web Hosting and a Website which performs well?

It is important to choose the best web hosting services to make your online business successful. Technical knowledge of some level is important and for most people, it is a important decision to be made with their own. You should search for a web designer first and establish a friendly relationship with that person. They will then guide you further to find the best web hosting service as per your requirements.

Performance of your website strongly depends upon your web hosting plan. The hosting plan you choose directly effects the experience your prospective customers will have on your site. When shopping for business web hosting, people often make the mistake of looking for the cheapest plan they can find. The problem with this approach is that you are not just paying for hosting, you are paying for bandwidth, which directly effects how fast your web page will load. If your page loads too slowly your prospective customer will never see your site, but bandwidth is not the only factor that effects page load time.

Factors include:

The number of people connecting to your site at the same time.
The type of content you have on your site (the number of images, flash, video, audio, CMS).
How well your website is coded.
Back up and restore capabilities
Pre-loaded open source software
Security features

Of the six factors listed above, #3 is the primary offender for page load delays. Poorly coded websites are most often the result of machine-generated code, from do-it-yourself website builder applications.

Choosing a Web Designer first   Knowledge and Relationship

There are many choices for web hosting companies and many different types of web hosting services. Knowing what web hosting you will need for your website before it even exists is difficult, if not impossible. That is why you will need to begin with an experienced web designer. That person will be able to build a custom website for you and will know what type of hosting will be necessary to accommodate your site. When you hire a web designer, he or she will begin with gathering requirements from you in which you will discuss all the features and content you would like to have on your site. Your designer will then choose a web hosting service that can handle all the requirements of the site that they are going to build for you.

Another reason to begin with choosing a website designer or developer first, is that they will design your site based on the idea that they will provide the hosting and that there will be an ongoing relationship. Business web hosting often includes the hosting as well as some type of website support contract so that you will have someone you can go back to on a consistent basis. You will get personal one-on-one attention and ongoing support from someone you have a history with, and who thoroughly knows your website and your business model.

Choosing Web Hosting First   A Space in Need of a Site

If you begin with choosing your hosting plan first, then look for a designer, you set yourself up for several problems. First of all most web designers will not take a job building a website that could potentially be more than the hosting plan can handle. Secondly, many hosting services have different shareware applications that come with the hosting. You could have trouble finding a developer who is familiar with the shareware that comes with your hosting plan.

Another problem with choosing the hosting plan first is that a hosting company is concerned only with selling the hosting and nothing more. If you encounter any problems outside of hosting, the hosting company will not be able to help you. You will be essentially orphaning yourself before the project has even begun. Most web designers and developers offer their clients web hosting as well as maintenance contracts, but if you choose the hosting company first, then the person who builds the site for you does not have an ongoing relationship with you. Since there is no contract tying you to them, they have no vested interest is making your website successful.

Choosing a web hosting service for your website can be a complicated but very important decision. You will have the greatest chance for success with your website, if you begin by choosing a web designer or developer first and then have a hosting and maintenance contract with that person. That will ensure that your hosting plan will be appropriate for your website and that you will always have a website professional available when you need them.

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What is ASP?

February 28th, 2009

Active Server Pages (ASP), is a server-side scripting engine which allows web site developers to add interactive functions to web pages. Such dynamically-generated pages use input from the user to determine how a web page is presented. An example of its use would be to enable a web site visitor to log into a message board, or to give access to a secure database. When ASP is used within a page, then the usual “.html” suffix is replaced with “.asp”.

ASP was introduced by Microsoft as an add-on to Internet Information Services in 1996. It has undergone several revisions since then, with the biggest change occurring in 2002 with the introduction of ASP.NET, originally called ASP+. In earlier versions all scripts had to be placed inside HTML files; however the introduction of ASP.NET introduced full support for languages such as Visual Basic.NET. However, in-page scripting is still supported.

In order to run ASP scripts you will need to install an ASP server, normally either Internet Information Services or Personal Web Server, both from Microsoft. For non-Microsoft users there are some third-party implementations available that will allow users to run ASP scripts on a Unix or Linux server. Examples are ChiliASP or InstantASP.

Scripts used for ASP content are normally written in VBScript but it is possible to use other languages instead. Jscript is another Microsoft product that can be used and PerlScript is one example of a third-party language often used. There are several web sites that have collections of scripts available for use, often at no charge. Some examples are HotScripts.com or Scripts.com but a simple Google search will bring up many more. If you prefer to write your own scripts then this is fairly straightforward for a person with some programming experience. There are also many tutorials available on the Internet for those less experienced.

As mentioned above, ASP is a Microsoft product, although there are ways of running ASP on other operating systems. Having said this, you will get the best results when ASP is running in the environment for which it was created. This being so, it may be better to choose a web host that offers Microsoft-based servers. Don’t forget that this may also have other implications for your web site, such as your choice of database. You will need to check carefully to make sure that the web hosting company can provide full support for your database as well as ASP.

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