Web Hosting for News Sites

By Web Hosting on Nov 19, 2007 in Web Hosting

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Web Hosting for News Sites

Many people today have turned away from TV and radio to a new medium for news. They have instead turned to a medium which allows them to both get the news whenever they want and search up any archived articles they are interested in. This new medium is the internet and it is filled with online news sites to feed the needs of people in search of yesterday’s or today’s news. This niche of websites attracts a lot of visitors and many individuals have established profitable businesses on it. However, at the heart of the news site is the hosting service the website runs on. Picking a hosting service for a successful news site is no easy task and a wrong decision can cost you dearly in the future.

News sites have many considerations when choosing a web host. Among these are server resources(CPU/RAM), customer service, storage space, file types allowed, and bandwidth. There is also the issue of your host allowing certain scripts to run for updating news sites. Below we’ll take a look at these requirements and what the hosting options for running a news site.
The most pressing things for a news site is server resources. This basically boils down to two things: CPU cycles and bandwidth. Since most sites are hosted on a server that has hundreds of users on them, these two things are often a serious problem as there is just not enough computing power to go around. To get around this problem hosts generally either suspend accounts that are using too many resources or limit how many resources you can use. There are even hosts that charge a large hefty bonus to users without telling them. To avoid these things, you have to ask the host you are thinking of going with about the technical specifications of the hosting. Besides asking them questions, make sure to read the entire Terms of Service agreement provided by these hosts instead of just glossing over them as many of these technical things will be in the fine print. You will want to make sure that nowhere in the terms does it say you must pay extra fees for CPU cycle overages or you may be in for some hefty premiums. The other thing you will want to look for is the number of simultaneous mySQL or database connections they allow at one time. Since almost all news sites run off of some kind of script that utilizes an SQL database, the number of simultaneous queries will determine how many users can be on your site at the same time. For a popular news site this number could easily be in the hundreds or even thousands. Going with a host that limits your connections to 5 or 10 will be a giant roadblock of your future growth potential. Aside from CPU and Bandwidth, another thing to look for in the area of server resources is the rate of account suspensions. Some hosts will give you warnings and work with you to resolve over usage problems while others will suspend you without question and will delete you if your account consistently goes over the limit.
The second most pressing thing with news site is the quality of technical support. A busy news site is bound to have connection errors, database update errors, and other server glitches that will cause the site to be slowed, malfunction, or crash. No matter what kind of a hosting solution you are on, if one of these things happens, you will need fast technical support from competent technical staff to get your site up and running again. There are two ways to check the quality of technical support a host has. The first is to email the support staff directly and ask them some in-depth questions about how they would handle certain situations such as mySQL malfunctions, site slowdowns, and bandwidth outages. If they cannot answer these questions, then it would be advisable to look for another host. The second way to see how good the technical and customer support is for a host is the looking at hosting review sites and post on forums such as webhostingtalk.com to get people’s opinions on specific hosts. Of these two, I prefer forums over review sites. Many review sites are sponsored(get paid) by some of the biggest hosting companies and they will write dazzling reviews focusing on the hosts strengths but not mentioning any of its weaknesses. In these reviews, the amount of space and bandwidth(which for the most part is a marketing gimmick) is touted and technical support is often neglected or not mentioned. On the contrary, veterans of web hosting like the ones on webhostingtalk.com pay the most attention to the most critical aspects of web hosting such as uptime and technical support. They will tell you by personal experience which hosts to look at and which ones to avoid. Posting in such forums is also a good way to get good offers and discount deals from certain hosts who give forum members a small % discount.
Lastly, when looking at a hosting plan, you should take into account the space and bandwidth that the plan offers. Space is not really an issue most of the time because most hosts will give you tens of gigabytes of space on a plan for a relatively cheap price. With the price of hard drives falling everyday, the cost for disk space has become negligible for many web hosts. Estimate how much disk space you will need for your website by adding up all the disk space required for however many news archives you wish to store and any images and videos you need to display and multiply by 1.3. This is how much disk space you should be shooting for as the extra 30% will give you room in case you want to expand your content. For a starting news site 10GB is more than sufficient space. More important than space is bandwidth. You will need a good amount of bandwidth if your news site plans to have high-definition images and/or videos. If you allow people to embed videos from your site, you will require an even larger amount of bandwidth. If you just plan to have a plain-text news site with regular images, then 20-30GB of bandwidth is sufficient for you to get started. However, if you plan to have videos and clips of news on your site, then you will need at least 100GB of bandwidth to serve your visitors. Most hosts can offer more than adequate bandwidth for your site, but you should always check a host’s bandwidth limits and terms on over-usage of bandwidth.
Now since we have looked at some of the hosting requirements for news sites, lets look at some of the possible hosting choices you have.

1. Free Hosting - As with any kind of site, free hosting is something you may want to consider when just starting out but will soon have to move off of. Free hosting usually does not allow file types outside of text, html, php, gif, and jpg. This makes hosting movies and interactive content nearly impossible to do so staying on a free host might limit the content of your news site. Free hosts that do have PHP and MYSQL often place high restrictions on them such as a small limit on mySQL connections and only a few CPU cycles per second. Your account will get suspended immediately if you go over this amount. You should also expect frequent downtimes if you are hosting a database-driven site from a free hosting service. Most free hosting services are not making profit and therefore have a hard time coming up with the cash to maintain their servers. For this reason, you will also not have much technical support at free hosting companies. If your site goes down, you are largely on your own. If you must go for a free host, choose a well-established one that has the requirement of putting a banner on your site or having you post in forums. Hosts that offer hosting and ask for nothing in return have no funds and the service usually goes down within a short period of time.
2. Shared Hosting - Shared hosting is a step above free hosting. Like a free hosting environment, you are put on a server with many other people but since you are paying for the service, the level of customer support is substantially higher. In this environment, you still run a high risk of getting suspended for over-usage of CPU and RAM although the amount of tolerable usage varies from host to host. Shared hosting also offers more space and bandwidth to grow your website should you need expansion options. In additional, all shared hosts should have the basic PHP/MYSQL setup that people need to run a news script off of. MYSQL connections are also limited on a shared host and the number can vary from 5 to over 30. For a news site, look for a host that allows at least 20 connections at a time. Technical support ranges at shared hosts from great to non-existent. You get what you pay for and generally the more expensive hosts have far better technical support. I would advise against using the large hosting companies such as 1&1 as the technical support there is generally lacking. They have millions of customers and losing one will not hurt them much. Their hosting packages may look attractive, but the customer support that comes with it is most of the time horrendous. Instead go to webhostingtalk.com and ask around until you find a host that seems interested in working out a long-term relationship with you and your business.
3. VPS(Virtual Private Server) - For news sites that have an established user base, a virtual private server may be in store. These are for sites that need more server power than a shared account. In a VPS environment, each account is separated into its own space so the actions of one account will not effect the others. Each account is guaranteed equal CPU use share and a certain amount of RAM. The amount of resources you get depends on the level of VPS you buy. CPU is dependent on how many users per server there are and RAM is just however much the plan offers you plus a certain “burst rate” for emergency peak times. Starter VPS packages usually contain 256mb RAM while premium VPS accounts can guarantee 1GB of ram or more at all times. If your looking for a top-of-the-line VPS, check out wiredtree’s hybrid dedicated plan which is essentially a premium VPS running on a quad-core machine with lots of resources. VPS customers usually get better support than shared customers as they are paying more to the host and hosts will help you upgrade from a VPS to a dedicated solution when the time comes. For people who own a news site that gets a decent amount of visitors, a VPS should be in your consideration.
4. Clustered Hosting(Mosso) - This is a recent innovation and a possibility to look at. The company that offers this is Mosso.com, a spin-off of Rackspace. Its sort of like a shared environment but instead of using one server to power X amount of users, it uses a datagrid consisting of hundreds of servers to power X amount of users. On this grid, it is unlikely that one site will effect other sites since the combined processing power of the datagrid is vastly superior to that of one server. Account suspensions do not occur at a frequent rate and the host is willing to work with you if you should need another solution. While innovative, this kind of hosting is still in its infancy and SQL container problems and grid mishaps would have me advising you to seek another solution until these problems can be permanently solved. Also, this solution costs $100/month and at this price, you can find a fairly high-end VPS.
5. Dedicated Server - The most expensive of the options but the one that provides the most power. A dedicated server gives all the resources of a server to you. Account suspensions due to resource overages do not happen and no one else will effect your website. Upgrades to hardware and bandwidth can always be purchased at a cheap price and the host is more than willing to work with dedicated customer to keep them on-board. Company selection is important as you will want to select an established dedicated provider that has a reputation for good technical support. Dedicated providers with good reputations are Softlayer, Rackspace, Liquidweb, and Wired tree. Getting a managed dedicated from these guys will not let you down.

No matter what level of hosting you are looking for, careful research and asking many questions is needed to make a good decision. Plan and execute each step carefully, seek lots of advice and you will be able to find a host that fits you.

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