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Template Sites Hosting

With so many new websites appearing on the web daily, a hot commodity that many have turned into a business is the selling of web templates. This market is highly profitable and is easy to run once you get past the initial set-up. However, finding hosting for templates site is a difficult matter and there are many factors to take into consideration when searching for a host to run a template site. In this article we will look at some of these concerns as well as explore a few of the options you have for hosting a template site.

The first thing a template site should have concerns with when choosing hosting is the quality of technical support the host gives. Since a template site will usually be based off of an e-commerce script and involves a web shopping cart for financial transactions, errors such as a corrupted MYSQL database could be disastrous for your business. These things will undoubtedly come up in the long run and when they do, you will need a host who has prompt technical support personnel who have experience in handling such issues. Since the quality and responsiveness of technical support varies greatly from host to host and can range anywhere from amazing to non-existent, you’ll want to do careful research on the host(s) you have in mind. The best way to do this is to go to a large web hosting forum such as webhostingtalk.com or freewebspace.net and ask other people about the host in question. In large forums such as these, there are bound to be people who have used the host in the past or are currently using the host that will give you feed back on the quality of customer support. Most people here are veterans of searching for web hosting and will tell you the important things about the host and not just face-value things such as the amount of space and bandwidth offered. Another way to check on the technical support of hosts is to read ratings and reviews from web hosting review sites. I personally do not think this is as good as posting in forums because many web hosting review sites are sponsored by the larger hosting companies and may write great reviews about companies like 1&1, Powweb, Ipowerweb, and other big hosts just to get a bigger commission from their affiliate program while having very little experience with their actual service. Some hosting review sites will even delete negative reviews at a host’s request which makes such sites unreliable as sources of information.

After technical support, the second thing to look for in a host for template sites is what kind of e-commerce or shopping cart they provide. You’ll want to look for a host that supports OSCommerce or Miva Merchant by default as these are popular e-commerce scripts for template sites. You’ll also want a host that can support credit card processing on their servers as offering paypal as the only means of paying looks unprofessional and will discourage many people from buying from you. Along with proper E-commerce support, you’ll want a host that has SSL encryption at 128-bits to protect your customer’s financial data. All sites that deal with e-commerce have this and not having it will cost you many customers as a good number of people will not buy from a site that does not have secure encryption.

The third thing a template site should look for in a host is the amount of CPU/RAM they are allowed on a host. This really only applies to free and shared hosting because if you are on a VPS or dedicated environment, you can’t get suspended for over-usage of server resources and it is stated clearly how much you have to use. CPU/RAM is the main reason why most accounts are suspended on a shared host. While people mainly tend to look at space and bandwidth as the factors that will limit their site’s growth, this is not the case for most sites. Since all template sites generally run on some kind of an engine, they require a decent amount of CPU/RAM usage. While template sites are generally not as resource intensive as community driven sites such as Wiki’s, they still have to run a decent amount of SQL queries in order to display the templates and allow customers to order as well as process the financial details of the transaction. For this reason, you will want to read the fine print in the Terms Of Service agreements for the web hosts you are thinking of and be sure of their usage policies. You also need to look at their policies for account suspension and how they deal with customers who are constantly going over the limit. If a host’s Terms of Service agreements do not specify the amount you can use, you need to ask their sales or technical staff about their policies as they will directly effect you in the future. You’ll generally want to find a host that has lenient policies on usage and one that will not suspend your account the minute you go over the limit. Find a host that will give you a warning well in advance of any suspension activities and will work with you to resolve problems if you do happen to consistently be over the limit. Finding a host that is more accommodating to you can save you hours of downtime and much lost revenue in the future.

The last thing you should take a brief glance at for a template site is space and bandwidth. These things are not big concerns for template sites unless your templates are enormous in file size(and they shouldn’t be because no one wants templates that are 2mb in size). Generally most hosting plans will give you at least 5GB’s of space and 50 GB of bandwidth which is more than enough for the majority of template sites. You will most likely hit a CPU/RAM limit long before you hit any kind of space/bandwidth limit so do not put too much importance on these two things.

Now that we have looked at the needs for a template site, lets look at some of the possible hosting options.

1. Free Hosting - I would not go with free hosting for any kind of site that deals with E-commerce. Most free hosts simply do not support 128-bit encrypted SSL security which will be a big detriment to your business if you don’t have it. Free hosts also tend to be extremely unreliable in their SQL speed and usage. Databases will often crash on a free host and the data in them will be lost if this happens. Free hosts also usually do not back up data in an acceptable manner and so you cannot depend on them to retrieve your data if the server experiences a blackout. Most importantly, technical support at the majority of free hosts is just plain bad. Most free hosts do not have the finances to support a decent technical support staff so the staff usually consists of the owner and maybe one or two other people(if your lucky). Response times are slow and much of the time, you will not get a response at all. If you must go for a free host, I suggest checking out www.zoomcities.com and ask them if they can set up shared SSL for you. Zoomcities is known for quality free hosting and has the technical support and server to match up to most paid hosting companies.
2. Shared hosting – Shared hosting is my personal suggestion for people who want to start a template site. You will need to find a shared host that offers SSL support and supports scripts like OSCommerce and Miva Merchant. Since most hosts do offer these script as a default install, this is not hard to find. For an e-commerce site such as template site, you will not want to go with a large overseller such as Ipowerweb, Powweb, or bluehost as these hosts offer large amounts of space and bandwidth but are lacking in technical support. Instead look for a host such as downtownhost.com or mediatemple.com that are more expensive and offer smaller packages but are superb with technical support and customer troubleshooting issues. Don’t worry that your missing out on all the extra space and bandwidth that the major oversellers are offering because you probably won’t be using it anyways. Getting a host that is willing to work with you on CPU/RAM usage issues is far more important than finding a host with enormous amounts of space and bandwidth that you will never use.
3. VPS(Virtual Private Hosting) – If your template site grows, you will probably want to move up to this kind of a solution from a shared one. In this kind of solution, you will not have to worry about CPU/RAM allotments as each account is sectioned off from other accounts in a VPS environment. This means that no one account that use all of the CPU/RAM and bring down the server and that you will never get suspended(or at least should never get suspended) for over-usage. Note that a VPS is different from a semi-dedicated account, which is really just a large shared account on a server with a low client-to-server ratio. In a VPS, you are given a certain amount of CPU/RAM to use and a “burst RAM” rate for emergency peak hours. In a VPS, you also get full root access and can do many of the things that only admins can do on a dedicated server(you can’t partition drives because a VPS is not a true dedicated server).The amount of CPU/RAM you get depends what level of VPS you buy and can usually range from 128 guaranteed RAM to 1GB guaranteed RAM. If you get a VPS, I suggest getting a managed VPS that comes with a control panel such as cPanel so you don’t have to worry about server issues. If you see your site slowing down, you can always upgrade to a higher VPS plan or upgrade to a fully dedicated server.
4. Dedicated Server – If you’ve finally outgrown the highest-level of VPS on your host, then it is time you look for a mid-grade or higher dedicated server. Outgrowing a high-end VPS means that upgrading to a dedicated server with less than a dual-core processor and 1GB RAM will fail to see any real benefits as most high-end VPS are on a server with a very low client-to-server ratio and have 1GB of guaranteed RAM. If you are going with a dedicated server then I suggest going with a semi-managed or fully-managed solution and getting a control panel as part of the deal. Server management is quite tough to do and unless you are an expert in the field, you will want the technical staff at a datacenter or a hosting company to take care of such details for you. Being a managed dedicated customer means you’ll have priority technical support and may even have a 24/7 hotline you can call in case of emergencies. For dedicated customers who have managed server, you should expect a response time of less than 2 hours at the maximum. Some good dedicated hosts to look at are softlayer.com, gate2vn.net, wiredtree.com(recommended), and rackspace.com(recommended but expensive). Getting a server from one of these hosts will ensure quality technical support from friendly staff and a good long-term relationship with the hosting company.

Now since we have looked at the needs and the options for template site hosting, you should have an idea of what you are looking for in a host. Start with the hosts mentioned here and begin your search there. If you search long and hard enough, you will find a host that fits your needs.

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