One of the most important choices you as a webmaster will make is who your hosting company will be and what kind of hosting you will be using. The choices are many and most are confusing.

First lets get some commonly used words identified. A server is a box sitting in a data center somewhere using Linux or Windows NT as its operating system. It has a special card hooked into switching equipment that in turn is fed by large data communications companies - that precious bandwidth.

There are two basic types of hosting available. Shared, sometimes called virtual and dedicated. Shared hosting means you and an unknown number of other webmasters share the server box. You have a certain amount of space on the hard drive and you all share the bandwidth that is going to and from that box. Dedicated means you and only you have the space on that box. Your bandwidth however is usually shared with other boxes that are located in the same data center.

Adult sites don't usually take up too much hard disk space, but they sure can burn bandwidth. Sharing a server with others is usually a cheap solution depending on how much disk space and bandwidth you chose. You probably won't run out of disk space but the bandwidth can be another issue. If there are ten people on that box and three of them hit the Hun on the same day - your sites are going to crawl if the host has a cap on how much bandwidth that box can use.

If your virtual host has allowed some of the people on that box to install CGI, Perl, or PHP scripts - some of those incorrectly installed can crash the server. Not only will their sites go down - but yours as well. And finding the offending script can take the host some time. For this reason many virtual hosts don't allow scripts or databases to be installed or they have their own techs do the installations and setup.

If your bandwidth needs are small and you only have a few sites - virtual hosting is probably a good choice for you. It's how many webmasters have started, getting their feet wet in a managed server environment and moving up to their own server as they grow in knowledge and numbers of sites.

Free hosting should be mentioned here also. First of all there is no such thing as free hosting. You may not pay for bandwidth but you will be paying something. After all the host has to pay for HIS bandwidth and facilities too. The most common way that these bills are met is by placing advertising headers and/or footers on your pages that are hosted on a "free" box. Sometimes these ads are small and fairly unobtrusive, other times they can take up quite a bit of page real estate and siphon traffic from your site to the host's ads. Another pitfall to free hosting is the bandwidth. Let's say his bandwidth suppliers allow the host 500 GB of bandwidth for each machine. He has a 50 GB hard drive in that box. He gives each user 10 MB of space. Theoretically he can put 5,120 10 MB clients on that box. It is doubtful any free host has that many, but lets say he only puts 512 - 10% of what he COULD host on that machine. If each of those clients burned just 2 GB of bandwidth a month - the host would have no choice but to buy more bandwidth at a higher price to keep those sites running well, or he'd have to "cap" it. There are ways a host can be sure that a machine will only use a specific amount of bandwidth. If more is needed to load your site than is available - your site either loads very slowly, waiting for more bandwidth to become available or it doesn't load at all. If your 404 pages go to the host's ad page, well you can see what could happen to your traffic.

Many people recommend starting with free hosts to learn the ropes. My advice is to learn the ropes first and then use free hosts if you must. How can you know if your site design or marketing techniques are working if your site loads too slowly for a surfer to wait and see what you have to offer? Or how do you know that slam bang table ad is any good if the host's advertising hits the surfer first and takes up a quarter or more of the viewable screen? In other words your results could be badly influenced by the hosting.

Dedicated servers are no longer the realm of the wealthy. They have come down in price to the degree that many moderately successful webmasters can afford them. If your virtual hosting bill is hitting the $200 a month mark looking into a dedicated server is a good idea. Dedicated server deals come with the machine and a specific amount of bandwidth. If you go over the bandwidth allocation you will pay per gig for what you use - $2 or less is becoming pretty average.

The advantages of a dedicated server are the ability to put pretty much whatever you want on it. A good dedicated host allows all scripts, global directories, databases, etc. You aren't sharing your server space with anyone else but you could still be sharing bandwidth.

A good dedicated host will have your server set up with the programs and operating system you need to run your sites. Some will give you access to a control panel that will allow you to add .htaccess to your sites, add your own domains, enable email, and other maintenance functions. Other hosts will do some or all of these chores for you.

So dedicated hosting sounds like a gift from the gods right? Just go out and find the cheapest dedicated hosting package and you're off to the races. Wrong. Dedicated hosting brings a whole new set of considerations into the hosting game. The first is what is your host going to do for you? How will they maintain the equipment that you've leased from them? Hardware failures are rare, but they do occur. Do they back up your box on a regular basis? Or will your data be gone with the wind in a system crash? Do they use more than one bandwidth supplier? How far away is their equipment from the main data pipe? In other words are they buying directly from Verio and reselling to you or are there other providers in between? The more providers between your box and the main pipe, the more "hops". The more hops, the more problems in routing, switching and system slowdowns. Will the host install scripts for you as part of your monthly charge or will those be additional cost? How responsive is their tech department? Do they have more than one tech? Presales emails are usually answered pretty quickly, but when it's midnight on Saturday and you need that site working right by Monday - will there be someone to help you?

Perhaps the biggest problem is billing. Bandwidth can be billed in so many different ways that it becomes very confusing. What you think you're using, you may not be. What you think your bill is may be totally wrong. Are they billing for both in and out? If so - loading that huge set of pics will count against your allocated bandwidth just as much as a surfer visiting your site. Are you being billed for what you actually use, or are you being billed by bandwidth blocks? Are you being billed by bits per second or gigs per month? One gigabit per second is approximately 320 Gigs per month. Note that's bit, not byte. Or 95th percentile? A billing method that takes out the "spikes" or the top 5% of your actual usage and only bills

Is there an additional charge for ips? Is it one time or monthly? If your box doesn't have enough memory - is it a one time charge to add more or is it billed monthly also? It's easy to get nickel and dimed to death if you don't read ALL the terms and conditions and ask the right questions. Some hosts even charge you for leaving them!

How long do you have to wait for a new site to be activated on your server? I'm not talking about the dns changes - the time for those is usually outside the host's control. I am talking about how long until you can load things to that site and how often do they reboot their name servers?

While most hosts who specialize in adult site hosting and large bandwidth servers are easily found by researching an adult resource board, many mainstream hosts allow adult content on their servers as long as it's legal content and you're on a dedicated box. And their prices and offerings are often as good and in some cases better than the Adult specialists.

Be sure to read the TOS and every piece of information you can find on any hosting site. Contact them before you buy and ask anything you may not understand. Talk to current and former customers if you can find them and ask questions on the resource boards. Bear in mind there will always be some disgruntled customers. The best service, support and equipment in the world will still not satisfy everyone. Do your homework and research as if your business depended on it - because it does.

KayS