What Should You Look For in a Web Hosting Company?
Saturday, April 17th, 2010What you are looking for from a web hosting company will depend very much on the type of hosting you want to start with. If you want private hosting, which means that your website is hosted on its own server, then you can expect to pay more for the package than you would with shared hosting. Again, if you wanted dedicated web hosting where you not only have your own server, you also have the disk, and then you can expect to pay considerably more for your package.
What most people are looking for if they want to run a website for their small or home business is a good level of reliability and up time. Up time refers to how often your website is live, if the server goes down then not only will your visitors not be able to access your website, neither will you. So one of the most important considerations when it comes to web hosting, perhaps even more important than the cost of that hosting, will be the issue of how often your website is live (or, more importantly, how long it is likely to be offline). If you want to make a success of your website, then you should really be looking for a hosting company that is able to provide at least 99% up time.
Once you have established that you are going to get the kind of up time that you need for your website, the next thing you need to look for is how fast your web pages load when you go to the URL. If the loading time seems to be a little excessive you may want to look elsewhere for hosting, because your visitors will soon start to look elsewhere for your product if they have to wait too long for the pages to load. Site speed is also likely to start affecting how you rank within the search engines, so ensuring that it isn’t too slow will help you to gain visibility.
If you are not going to use a dedicated platform such as WordPress for your website, then you will need to know how much technical support and help you are going to need. If you are familiar with php and can do your own coding and deal with problems as they arise, then you may not need to have hosting that is compatible with a content management system such as WordPress.
Most web hosting companies should provide you with a list of services and how much technical support they offer. You should look at the amount of bandwidth that the company is offering, the usual amount is around 2 GB of bandwidth, which is sufficient for most websites. You should ask what their uptime is. If a company offers less than 99% uptime then look elsewhere, otherwise you could find that your website is down on a regular basis, which isn’t good for business. If a company is offering unlimited disk space then you could be paying for something you don’t need. Less than 5 MB of disk space is sufficient for most people’s websites. Although if you are likely to create a large site in time that will get a lot of traffic, this is a viable option.
Author Bio: Derek Rogers is a freelance writer who represents a number of UK businesses. To buy Teeth Whitening Gel online, he recommends Direct Whitening.
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