The Best Web Hosting Company

What to look for when seeking a web hosting company. There are many factors to take into consideration and each factor can be weighed according to what is most important to the user. MVI offers several different plans. The features from plan to plan differ. So do your research and compare different companies and plans until you weigh all the factors that are important to *your* needs.

What Does MVI Offer

Tech Support - I don't know about you, but I like the feeling of knowing that support is available when I need it. Test different companies before you sign up by sending them an email with a question or two and then see if they have a telephone support line that is being answered 24/7.

Uptime - The more uptime they guarantee, the better. 99% uptime is the minimum acceptable standard. But the quality of the data center is also important. MVI hosts from a NAP data center, NAP stands for Network Access Point and that means that our data center is right on the Internet with the NAP being the doorway to the Internet. There are only 7 buildings like this in the USA. So it makes sense that our uptime would be free of any Internet connectivity issues.

Redundant - Redundant hosting is the only way to go if the Internet is important to your business. Redundant hosting means that MVI provides two servers and if one server goes down the other server automatically takes over eliminating down time. MVI will never have a server down longer then 15 minutes. You can sleep nights not worrying about downtime when your web hosting is on redundant hosting servers.

Disk Space - Decide how much disk space you will require. A web page with one logo does not take up much web space at all. Calculate how big your web site is in relation to the disk space allowed. Our lowest priced hosting plan provides 100MB of disk space more then enough to house a 5o page website.

Bandwidth - This factor is usually overlooked until the bandwidth limit is reached. If you are running a site with lots of downloads, or a site with lots of images such at a photo post site, your bandwidth will be a lot higher than a site with mainly text. Our lowest priced hosting plan offers 2 bib bandwidth per month.

CGI Bin - This is currently standard with good hosting companies. If you do not have access to your own CGI Bin, you cannot install scripts and programs.

Perl - If you do not have Perl, you cannot run Perl programs. Many good scripts that you buy or get for free are written in Perl. In my opinion, it would be a limitation not to have the latest version of Perl installed.

SSL - If you intend to accept credit card orders directly from your website, you will need Secure Socket Layer included in your plan. This is one of those easily overlooked features. You might sign up for a plan that looks attractive for whatever reason, then down the track, you might discover that you need this feature. If it is not included in your plan, you will be charged extra. To use this feature you need a merchant account. There is no need to make this a priority if you have no merchant account because you can use a third party credit card processor. MVI plans Silver an above provide SSL for security,

SSI - Server Side Includes are great if you want to spend minimal time updating your site. Here's how it works. The left and right nav menus and the little search engine in the left nav menu are "included" with an SSI command in the master page template. If I need to update one of the nav links, there is no need to edit all the pages that contain the menus. I just edit one file which contains the menu html and upload it to my site.

MySQL - What scripts are you going to run? Some programs require a MySQL database to run. MVI will charge you extra for a MySQL database, because this database will run on a separate server. Why do we use a separate db server ? Well that makes your database more secure. Also protects you better against the lost of data.

PHP - Many new scripts and programs require PHP support. PHP is a specialty at MVI we have been using and all our servers operate PHP for no charge.

Domain Name - What's the point in buying web space if you cannot point your own domain name to the site? Some companies will help you register a domain name but you should compare prices and learn how to register your domain yourself. This way you are in control of your domain name if you ever change hosts.

FTP Access - Unlimited and unrestricted FTP access to your site is essential. You will need an FTP program to transfer files.

Control Panel - Not all control panels are the same. Some are easier to use than others. With some control panels the learning curve is steep while others are easy.

Statistics Program - A good stats program is essential if you want to keep an eye on how many visitors you are getting, where they are coming from, referrers, top entry and exit pages and so on. MVI offers an excellent stats programs as standard.