Building the website: Things to consider

As part of my research on website hosting I decided to read up on some of my first year stuff. One of my favorite websites on the internet that doesn't involves .jpg files of cats is: http://www.w3schools.com/ , which is a great website to give anybody a introduction to HTML, CSS, Javascript, etc etc. I only wish I found out about while I was in High School (not that I did any classes related to IT for my HSC but whatever).

Anyway, here is a list of things I should consider when looking for a Internet Service Provider.

Make sure your ISP offers 24-hours support. Don't put yourself in a situation where you cannot fix critical problems without having to wait until the next working day. Toll-free phone could be vital if you don't want to pay for long distance calls.

I don't see this as a mandatory factor, especially as the Call center will probably be in a country that speaks another language.

Make sure your ISP runs a daily backup routine, otherwise you may lose some valuable data.

This is a major factor for me, when a ISP does a backup. To often have I heard horror stories about a ISP been brought down and some struggling photographer having his complete body of work published on the website and having no backups for the photos, loosing a lot of data.

Study the ISP's traffic volume restrictions. Make sure that you don't have to pay a fortune for unexpected high traffic if your web site becomes popular.

This is another major factor for me. Denial of Service attacks are all the rage these days with 'hackers', so a ISP that can accomidate for unexpected traffic flow and not charge me an extra cent would be nice.

Study the ISP's bandwidth and content restrictions. If you plan to publish pictures or broadcast video or sound, make sure that you can.

Well this just goes hand in hand with doing a communications subject. The only thing I can review will be video games and all the stuff posted will be original content, so I really don't have to worry about this one.

Make sure your ISP supports the e-mail capabilities you need.

This really doesn't matter either. Between NUmail, Gmail and Hotmail, who needs a @yourowndomain.com address. I'll probably operate the site with a gmail account as the email contact as Google mail is considered the most professional of the big email service providers (according to most of the text books I read on how to construct resumes).

If you use FrontPage to develop your web site, make sure your ISP supports FrontPage server extensions.

This doesn't matter as most of the website will be built in Adobe Dreamweaver. However I'll keep an eye out for it as a feature as its just another toy in the sandbox I can play with if I have to choose between two service providers that provide everything I need from the above.

If you plan to use data from databases on your web site, make sure your ISP supports the database access you need.

Same as Front Page extensions, just another toy in the sandbox if I need one.