Which Web Hosting plan ?
There is what seems an endless choice when it comes to choosing a web hosting company, but what options should we really be looking for and are most interested in?
We’ve asked around to ascertain what people actually look for in a web hosting plan and it was actually very surprising and offers a lot of food for thought when looking around regardless of whether you’re a complete novice or a seasoned website creator
Price
A Cheaper web hosting provider is something we all want, and much of the time we actually end up paying for things that we never use such as services to submit your articles to search engines, initially this might be something you need, but once your listed in a search engine new pages get picked up by the search engine very quickly.
So in essence decide on what you need today and tomorrow and then stick to this, not only will you be able to do exactly what you need, but you can also sleep easy knowing that there will be no more expenses until you need to renew your hosting package.
After Sales Support
Having a decent support service after you’ve paid for your web hosting plan is vital, especially if you are in the process of setting up your very first website
It really makes no difference as to the size of the hosting company when it comes to after sales support, its all a question of how much the company wants to invest in this side of the business, one feature worth looking for though is live chat.
Reliability & Downtime
You need your website to be up and running 24×7, any downtime due to your web hosting company not only costs you potential visitors and revenue (if your site makes money), but what happens if one of the major search engines is trying to spider your website and it can’t find anything? It could be viewed as a black mark against your site and get it penalized in terms of pages indexed or even your whole site.
Extras & addins
Planning before you decide which web hosting plan is right for you will pay huge rewards in the long term. If the hosting company cannot provide exactly what you need don’t be prepared to compromise on this, after all they provide a general service, its only you that knows exactly what you need to build your site and blog to your specifications.
Easy administration
Which web hosting plan gives you the most easy to use administration tools? A lot of website administration can be very hard even for an experienced website designer; this is time which could be much better spent actually working on your site.
Shall I use Windows or UNIX hosting?
Windows or UNIX web hosting? both of them have their advantages and disadvantages, the only thing I will add from personal experience is I initially started with Windows web hosting, but soon changed it when I wanted to create a dynamic website and blog, there just seemed to be so many Unix programs around that were free, that literally setup my sites and blogs for me, plus a whole range of add-ins and plugins to quickly and easily do all manner of things without me having to have any real programming experience, it just made my whole introduction to web building so much easier.
Automatic Hosting Renewal
This is really down to personal preference, it’s true that most websites never make it past one or two pages and then its left alone and never used again, but when the end of the first year approaches do you really want to keep the website? Most people sadly don’t, but they still end up getting charged for it as many hosting companies automatically re-bill you each year, and unless you notify them before hand you can do nothing to stop this.
So when you sign up for a hosting package make sure they will not do this without your permission.
Planning for website growth
Ok so you have started your website, everything has been going ok, you wake up one morning check your site, things have gone ballistic, your traffic has multiplied by 1000 over night and your now receiving emails from people complaining that they cannot get onto your site, what is the next step? You contact your hosting company, but they cannot offer any other package that would suit your extra needs. This situation would be a nightmare, you have lots of traffic, great, but your hosting provider cannot handle it, this is why it’s better to check when you first sign up what expansion options are available to you.
Which email
It never ceases to amaze, the amount of people who setup a website, get free email with this associated to the domain, and yet still choose to use a free email service. Using the service provided by the hosting company not only looks more professional than the free service, but it also offers many other options such as using unique names such as jon@computer-adviser.com, as opposed to jon234234@hotmail.com
Finding which web hosting plan is right for you; other considerations
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