As a web designer one of the most frequent questions I get asked is : who shall I host my site with? With so many potential  web hosts out there the answer is not always that simple.

If I am building them a site through my web design company 76 Creative, I would always recommend that they use our fully managed hosting service, as it requires no work or knowledge on their part. However, the 76 Creative managed service is reserved for clients of 76 Creative only. You can only get it if 76 are designing and building your site for you.

For many private clients, and friends who are looking to get started with creating their own site or hosting a WordPress blog, I have recommended 1 and 1 hosting. I myself host with 1 and 1 and find that their prices, customer service and the range of web services available through their hosting control panel make them a good choice.

The main factors that people seem to be attracted to in a web host are price and amount of server space allocated. These 2 factors are often used as a means by which to compare different offers and packages available. I guess this makes sense in a way, as they are both very tangible factors that can easily be compared. However, most websites take up less than 100MB of space on the server, so is server space really the most important factor?

Other factors that are often compared are the server's uptime and connection speed.

Two factors I find most important which seem to get less attention are the quality of customer service, and the quality of the hosts control panel. If a host doesn't offer any kind of control panel for you to manage your websites, email accounts etc. then I wouldn't reccomend them.

Many hosts offer the cPanel control panel which is packed with features and easy to use. Other hosts offer more bespoke control panels which range from extremely good to absoluteley useless. I won't name any names, but I have seen control panels from some hosts that offer absolutely nothing, you have to email them every time you want to create a new email address or anything.

Here is my list of factors to consider when chosing your web host in order of importance:

1. Hosting Platform (Microsoft or Linux / Apache)
2. Server uptime
3. Monthly traffic permitted
4. Firewall
5. FTP Access
6. Other software (PHP version etc.)
7. Amount of server space allocated
8. Quality of control panel
9. Quality of customer support by phone
10. SSI  (Server Side Includes)  supported?
11. Password protected directories  supported?
12. Number of IMAP/POP3 email accounts
13. Spam filtering
14. Number of mySQL databases

Notice that I didn't include price in my list. The reason for this is that I would compare price against all these factors together. Price is obviously the most important factor in getting a good deal, but you also need a web hosting package that will suit your needs.

1&1 Hosting and Domains. 99.9% Uptime Guarantee, 25 GBit Connectivity & 24/7 Support! www.1and1.co.uk

1. Comments must be written in ENGLISH. Comments with Russian, Greek, Chinese or Japanese characters will automatically be flagged as spam. Comments in languages other than English will be deleted.

2. Read the other comments first to see if anyone has already asked the same question as you.

3. I may or may not reply depending on how busy I am. I apologise in advance for not being able to respond to all the enquiries I receive.

It is important to protect email addresses on websites from being harvested by spambots.

"Email spambots collect e-mail addresses from the Internet in order to build mailing lists for sending unsolicited e-mail, also known as spam. Such spambots are web crawlers that can gather e-mail addresses from Web sites, newsgroups, special-interest group (SIG) postings, and chat-room conversations. Because e-mail addresses have a distinctive format, spambots are easy to write. A number of legislators in the U.S. are reported to be devising laws that would outlaw the spambot." – Wikipedia

This is my method for automatically detecting email addresses and replacing them with a javascript that will disguise them from spambots. The script works in two stages one in javascript and the other in php.

First the javascript function that outputs the mailto link:

function sb_email(user,site){
document.write('<a href=\"mailto:' + user + '@' + site + '\">');
document.write(user + '@' + site + '<\/a>');
}

The function has 2 parameters "user" and "site", which are the two parts of the email address either side of the "@". This function can be called like so:

sb_email('joe','bloggs.com');

The second part is the php functions that recognise email addresses and replace them with the javascript function to disguise them:

//function to output the js
function create_js ($matches){
$parts = explode ('@', substr ($matches[0], 1));
if(substr($parts[1],-1)=='.'){$parts[1]=substr($parts[1],0,-1); $parts[2]='.';}
$str = $matches[1].'<script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript">';
$str .= 'sb_email("'.$parts[0].'", "'.$parts[1].'");';
$str .= '</script>'.$parts[2];
return $str;
}
$js_callback = "create_js ";
 
//function to recognise emails
function email_protect($text){
global $js_callback;
$replace = '/([> ])[A-Z0-9._-]+@[A-Z0-9][A-Z0-9.-]{0,61}[A-Z0-9]\.[A-Z.]{2,6}/i';
$output = preg_replace_callback($replace, $js_callback, $text);
return $output;
}

The email_protect php function can be called on any text string like so:

echo email_protect($text);

It will automatically replace any email addresses in the text with the javascript, therefore hiding them from spambots.

I've been receiving a bit of spam on my blog lately obviously none of it gets through, but its still annoying having to delete it all. So, I have decided to take measures against it by implementing a few changes on my blog. I have installed the Captcha! plugin which now requires users to manually enter the text they see in the picture before their comment is submitted. I have also activated the Askimet plugin which flags comments as spam based on the askimet database.

Whilst looking at the different ways to fight spam I found this article: The Solution to Blog Spamming, which I found very useful.