Your Guide to Website Design and Management

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Choosing a Web Host Provider >>

Provider Investigation Checklist


There are LOTS of different options which will have different levels of importance depending on your goals, budget, etc. Below I offer a basic table you can use as a starting point for a checklist as you investigate different hosting providers.


Option

Host #1

Host #2

Host #3
Pricing
Setup Fee
Monthly Price
Upgrade / Updates (none, on request, proactive, etc.)
Operating System
Applications
Control Panel
Core Capabilities
Shared/Virtual/Dedicated
# IPs
Additional IP Cost
# of Domains
# Sub-Domains
Private Nameservers
Control Panel Technology
Hardware / Infrastructure
Unix/Linux/Windows
Disk Space
Additional Disk Space
Bandwidth
Additional Bandwidth Cost
Hardware
Min. RAM
Max. RAM
24x7 Support (phone/Web only)
Contract required / special terms
Access / Site Management Capabilities
# FTP Accounts
Anonymous FTP
Shell Access (SSH)
DNS / Bind
Email Related
# POP3 Accounts
IMAP Support
Web-based Email
SPF/SenderID Support
Spam Filter
Email Aliases
Catch All account
Auto responders
Mailing Lists
Mail forwarding
SMTP
Spam filtering
Development Tools
# MySQL DBs
Custom Error Pages
CGI (private)
PHP
Perl
Python
Cron Access
FrontPage Support
SSL (Shared)
SSL (Private)
Curl Support
Override .htaccess Support
Reporting Capabilities
Raw Log Files (extended)
Referrer Logs
Error Logs
AWStats
Analog Stats
Other web stats
Server Side Includes
Password Protect Directories
Backups (on-server or off-server)
Optional Program Support (version)
Fantastico Script Support
phpMyAdmin
phpBB
phpList


"For people who make websites" - A List Apart Magazine explores the design, development, and meaning of web content, with a special focus on web standards and best practices.
HTML Validator is a Mozilla extension that adds HTML validation inside Firefox and Mozilla. The number of errors of a HTML page is seen in the form of an icon in the status bar when browsing. The details of the errors are seen when looking the HTML source of the page.

The extension is based on Tidy and OpenSP. Both algorithms were originally developed by the Web Consortium W3C. Both algorithms are embedded inside Mozilla/Firefox and makes the validation locally on your machine, without sending HTML to a third party server.
This project aims to create an archive of user contributed clip art that can be freely used.
Starting at the beginning, this reference explains everything you need to know about using core JavaScript. It assumes you have the following basic background: a general understanding of the Internet and the World Wide Web and a good working knowledge of HTML. An excellent resource.
Edit your images on the fly online with Splashup, a web-based image editor that integrates with Flickr, Facebook, and Picasa. Splashup offers up a surprising array of image editing tools, far beyond the usual crop of resize and contrast-- you can also edit multiple images, play with filters and layers, use a variety of brushes, and more. Splashup is one of the best image editors in a long line of image editors; i.e., Picnik, Pixoh, and Resizr, to name just a few.[Lifehacker Annotation]
This website will let you:
  • Create an XML sitemap format that can be submitted to Google to help them crawl your website better.
  • Create a Text sitemap to submit to Yahoo.
  • Create a ROR sitemap, which is an independant XML format for any search engine.
  • Generate an HTML site map to allow human visitors to easily navigate on your site.
Clearspring's free Launchpad widget builder lets you easily turn your website's content into a widget which site visitors can use to place your content on all the major social media sites (MySpace, FaceBook, Google, hi5, Live, Yahoo, Wordpress, Blogger, etc.). The service also provides tracking and analysis.
This site features online text and html changing, modifying, converting tools designed to save you time making web pages or preparing text for web publication. If you've ever needed to capitalize sentences or convert line breaks to <p> or <br /> then this site can save you needless manual labor. There are other useful tools as well, like the one to uncompress html to make it readable and the ones to uppercase or lowercase text. Basically, the most common tasks that someone who works in an office or does freelance web development might encounter. Most of the tools have been created using javascript so you should be able to change large amounts of text as the processing is done on your computer instead of being limited by a server script.
The reliability of your host provider's servers should be a constant concern to you. After all, you rely on their reliability to keep your business running. How can you tell just how reliable their servers are? Read this article and find out for yourself.
A very active forum for discussions about web hosting (dedicated, managed, and reseller hosting, co-location, virtual private server, and much more).
Dan Lemnaru created this website to help you find a wide selection of independent reviews and comments to help you pick the right hosting company. This site will help you quickly find actual customer comments about specific hosting companies as well as reviews.

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