One of the first challenges in building a website is finding good reliable hosting that doesn’t break the bank. At Luminous Productions we have worked with dozens of web host over the years. At times, customers would provided their own hosting environments for us to develop in. We strongly discourage bringing your own hosting company to a web development firm as some hosts are more development friendly than others and not all host are equal. Hosting should only be selected after an exploratory phase has been conducted to determine technology and development needs.

Understanding “Unlimited” Hosting Plans

The term unlimited can be very misleading when comparing web host. Many host will provide some sort of unlimited plan, however they may limit your data rate. For instance, you may have unlimited bandwidth and space for the month, but you are limited on the amount of data that can be transmitted per second. This can be extremely crippling for high volume websites. You may be limited by processes. For instance, you could be limited to 25 concurrent processes. Don’t worry, that doesn’t necessarily mean 25 users at a time, but 25 simultaneous requests for data. Usually a user will only use a process very briefly while requesting a page.

Beware of New Hosting Companies

There are new hosting companies popping up all of the time. If the company doesn’t have strong financial footing they may not last long. The last thing that you want to do is be forced to move hosting because your hosting company went bankrupt. Find an established hosting company that has a good reputation.

Who Do We Recommend?

Good question. If only the answer were that easy. It really depends on what you are doing. For the budget conscious, most bang for your buck, we resell and recommend Hostgator. For those looking for the ability to expand rapidly, we recommend using Amazon AWS or Elastic Cloud Hosting. Be careful if you are new to hosting and web development. Amazon hosting is not as user friendly and can require a good bit of work to set up. On the bright side, it is scalable and you only pay for what you use. If you are looking for solid hosting at a steeper price, then you may want to consider: LiquidWeb.com