Tuesday 22 October 2013

Website Hosting - How To Get The Best Host For Your Website

By Penelope Raikes


The website hosting you select will play a huge role in the life of the website you shall create for your business. It is definitely true that how well your website is designed is a reflection of how good your products and services are. But you won't be able to show just how good your business is if you have made a poor decision on what web host to go for. If your website is slow to boot, is often inaccessible, or is filled with spammy advertisements, you won't be able to capture the attention of the visitors you are aiming for, or even to get them to buy from you. Therefore, you must always make the effort to evaluate your choices carefully when picking a web host.

Having said these, what's the best way to follow when getting website hosting? You must look into several attributes when you select a host for your website. But you should examine your bandwidth allocation, your server disk space allowance, the host's uptime guarantee, the quality of the host's customer support, and the pricing of the hosting package.

The performance of your website is hugely affected by how much bandwidth your website hosting has allowed you to use. When we say "bandwidth," we talk about how much information gets moved from your website to whichever computer opens your site. Your site will initially require around 3GB of bandwidth or so. However, you are more likely to require more bandwidth as your website gets more traffic. It is important that you know your bandwidth allocation and the additional costs you'd shoulder upon exceeding that allowance. Stay away from any proposals involving unlimited bandwidth. There is no such thing as free lunch, even with hosting services.

A lot of website hosting companies attract clients by offering big disk space packages. Usually, the disk space bundled in the package can be as big as 100GB. There are even companies that give unlimited disk space. However, you don't really require more than 20MB of disk space. The exception is if you will be putting up videos and podcasts on your website.

Yet another crucial item you should check out when you select website hosting is its uptime. Anything lower than 99.9% uptime is absolutely unacceptable. Remember: If your website is frequently unavailable, your visitors will not be able to see what you have there. The amount of downtime your website receives can greatly impact your business. After all, a 99.9% uptime will still mean a downtime amounting to eight hours yearly. In case your host has to take its servers down for any length of time, you must be informed of it as soon as possible. More than that, the host has to give you some compensation in return to show that they value doing business with you.

Your chosen website hosting should also have extensive support documentation and multiple channels of customer support for whenever you need help regarding your website. You will never know when you'd have an issue with your website, so it's important that you have can access this help you need 24/7. You should be able to contact the host's customer support via live chat, telephone or email without any hassles.

And finally, cost matters when it comes to choosing website hosting. The service you get should have an affordable price tag. Never even think about free hosting if you're putting up a business website; it's definitely inappropriate. You don't have to spend much on hosting at all. There are a lot of web hosts that offer quality service for $10 or so monthly. However, before you avail of any web hosting, you have to be absolutely confident that you're obtaining more than your money's worth.

Picking the right hosting for your website is not an easy task. Still, you won't have to worry about your website hosting if you took the effort to evaluate your choices with utmost care.




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