Which website hosts ? 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 Hosting company 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
$$ The Price
Low cost web hosting what’s the catch? There is nothing wrong in looking around for a good price, but remember generally the cheaper the web hosting, the less you might actually get in terms of quality of service, this can include speed, bandwidth ( as very cheap hosting might include bandwidth limits and additional costs if exceeded)
Be prepared to pay a fair price and get exactly what you’re looking for rather than saving money and compromising on what you need, it may seem like a saving and it will be initially, but in the long term you might end up having to spend more money when the package does not suit your needs.
Technical Support
Support for your website is a must, hopefully you will never experience problems, but if you do you will want to be able to contact someone easily and quickly.
You could go to a hosting service offering great prices, super fast speeds, but without a good service behind them it only takes one incident and you need to contact them and their begins the problems, so a good support service is a very big thing.
How reliable is the service?
What is worst having the greatest website that is offline all the time, or the worst website that’s online all the time? What’s the point in having a greatest website when no one will ever see it, so when choosing which website hosts it’s absolutely vital that it is reliable, just imagine if a very popular website was down even for a few hours, the revenue lost could run into millions.
Add-ons, databases etc
Which extras do you think you will need? If you’re creating a blog or dynamic website then you will need some type of backend database, will you be sending or receiving lots of emails, then you will need lots of email storage and bandwidth, otherwise you could run into lots of problems. This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to add-ons so it’s something that really need to be planned.
Easy to use admin
When deciding which website hosts think about how easy it is to administer and manage everything provided by hosting company, this is a big thing especially if your new to web hosting and how everything works, rather than getting bogged down with complexities.
Do you think you’d prefer Windows Hosting? You might be surprised
The percentage or Windows versus Unix users is very large, so of course most of us will naturally select a Windows as opposed to Unix when choosing the server type, this is what I did, but only after reading about PHP, MySQL did I realise my mistake, luckily though the hosting provider was able to move me over pretty quickly. If you want to create a dynamic website or blog firstly determine which technology you will user to build it, if like myself you choose PHP, MySql then Unix is the way to go. The actual Unix side of things is pretty hidden from you, as you only need to know about what your actually running.
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.
Expanding your web empire
Starting a website costs can be kept to a minimum, but what if your website begins to grow very quickly and the traffic increases at a rapid rate, your current hosting package just might not be enough, for example you might find as your probably on a shared server the extra traffic load might can cause slow downs for your visitors as the server struggles to cope, thinking about this now and ask how easy it would be to upgrade if necessary.
Email accounts
If your setting up a website make sure you use the email provided, it will be associated to the domain name and it makes your website look much more professional than using one of the free services.
Which would you rather use..
Webmaster@computer-adviser.com or webmaster2221@hotmail.com, the first appears much more professional, rather than using an address, generally associated to home users.
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