Selecting a web service

December 2006 - before how2why4.com

My first task in creating a website was to find a service. I'd been on a plane to Chicago that diverted to Houston, so I bought a copy of Wired magazine and was looking through the ads in the back. One ad for a hosting service jumped out at me because of the price and features.

This service was siteground.com. I liked it, because at this time I was trying to learn without spending a lot of money, and because it had great features I was looking for. I want to say emphatically, I have no relationship with site ground except that I'm a happy customer of their service.

Here're some of the considerations that caught my eye, and why:

• FREE Domain - they help you find a domain name for your site. Isn't that how we all start? If I just pick the right name...
• 250 GB Web space - I knew I would need lots of space since I was going to be successful. At the time, it was 40GB, now its 250. So far, I'm not even close to using 40GB with multiple websites - more about that when we talk about managing your site.
  
• 2500 GB Traffic - thought we just talked about GB, so what's up with this? Oh, yeah, this is monthly traffic - and since I'm doing videos to lots of people, yeah, this sounds good.
  
• 99.9% Server Uptime - I know this is important - websites are like parachutes, if they fail the first time someone tries them, they don't come back. I have to say, there have been very brief moments where my site hasn't worked, but just pushing "refresh" always brings it back up. I think that's 99.99, actually.
  
• 24/7 Top Customer Care - I've had great support - and even with a computer science background, it can be confusing. These folks are good.
  
• CPanel and Fantastico - frankly, I didn't know what this stuff was and didn't care that much. I care now. It's good. I don't have to know unix to manage my site. And I was to meet both, again, very soon.
  
• Immediate Activation - no lie.
  
• Mediawiki installation, tutorial, servers, etc. - I had just read Wikinomics and was all juiced to start making lots of friends, build a collaborative website, and hopefully some side money. I even wanted my kids to help. That last part was just fantasy. Zing. I played around with mediawiki, but ultimately chose a different engine, also supported by siteground.com - tikiwiki. More on that later.