Thursday, July 14, 2011

Tips on Web Hosting

By Gregory Trune


You can create a website with a number of purposes but the central idea remains to publish news, information, thoughts and views. One of the major reasons for creating blogs, forums and websites is online trade. It is the web hosting that allows you to tell about your services and goals to the world. A properly hosted website has the potentials to make your business organization popular all over the world. With its help you can inform everything about your products to your target consumers. In order to experience the advantages of building a website, you will need to decide on a web host very carefully. However, it is often a difficult task and needs a thorough research. When you search over the Internet, you will find numerous companies that offer web hosting services. Therefore, before choosing a particular web host, you need to ensure their reliability as well as find out about their company background. You also need to cross check whether they are able to provide all the necessary requirements.

Here are some steps in which one should move to fulfill the web hosting needs:

The primary step is to identify the requirement of web hosting:

Once you are determined that you have to create a niche for your website in the Internet, it's time to figure out the purpose of the website. Decide on what type of website you want to build. There are various types like, e-commerce, hobby site, interactive sites etc that can be adapted. If you want to feature an e-commerce site, security requirements are must. You will require Secure Sockets Layer encryption and also shopping carts which form the very basic components of an e-commerce site. If you want to feature a customer e-commerce site then it is essential that you select the right sort of web hosting environment that supports the various software systems. Blog sites are often developed in PHP or Perl/CGI scripting and these sites need access to MySQL or SQL databases. These factors are highly technical and those with little knowledge depend largely on the web hosts. Some web hosts take the advantage of the customer's ignorance and charge unnecessarily for such information. Therefore the only solution is to gather some knowledge before hiring the web hosts.

Required storage space:

Usually it is your content and type of your website that determines the required storage space. A small website with lesser features and content needs less space. While a large website that includes numerous pages, videos, images and graphics will require more storage space. Basically, an e-commerce website includes huge information and a great deal of data. Thereby, these sites require more space than other sites. You can find some web hosts that offer separate databases to their clients, where others do not. However, separate databases often create trouble as the storage spaces provided are not always the same as your web host claimed earlier.

Deciding on the bandwidth

Bandwidth of a website is essential. The number of hits that your website would experience could determine the bandwidth limit that your website requires. This can be stated in a simple way, if your website is a popular one and is used by the visitors frequently, your site would require or rather consume heavy bandwidth than a site on which visitors hardly click. Suppose you have a website that is simple without too many features and average webpage is of 8KB. If it is assumed that your web pages experience 10 hits per day, then your bandwidth per month would be 810x30.

Bandwidth is an essential factor of web hosting and before fixing up you deal with a company, try to estimate the size of your website. You can alternatively, put this decision on the web host's shoulders but provide the specifications of your website in details. Online forums and blogs consume more bandwidth than that of simple company websites. This is because visitors not only click on these websites for reading proposes but they also participate in it actively.

Web hosting features

While deciding on a particular web host you need to consider the web hosting features that you require. You can either use simple HTML or PHP/ ASP and Flash for developing your website. You need to clarify with your web hosts that they are able to provide you required services regardless of your technical bases. You also need to keep in mind that it is the programming languages that determine the appearance of your website. Moreover as it is your website, you must some a special access to it. It is with the help of FTP or Telnet that these special accesses are provided to you. Thereby, you need to clarify and confirm with the web hosting company about the kind of access you require for your website.

Different types of web hosting

The web hosts offer different types of web hosting services. The services differ on the basis of the finances and purposes of the web hosts. Web hosting can be of several types like dedicated, managed, shared, server co-location, reseller and free web hosting services. You can make your choice depending on your website requirements and budget. Dedicate web hosting is preferred mostly for bigger company websites with a huge budget. Smaller companies requiring a simple website generally opt for free web hosting. Every type web hosting of course has its own set of advantage and disadvantages. The most important factor however is the authenticity of the web host.

Some of the tips to move ahead:

* It is very important to have an idea of the value of data that a website would produce. This estimation would however be liable to change with time and maturity of the website.

* It is very crucial to find out the additional cost that your web host is demanding, in case you have opted for a separate database.

* It is suggested that you keep some free bandwidth and disc space in store if you want to expand your website in future.

* Beware of web host who claim to provide you with unlimited bandwidth as bandwidths and storage spaces can never be unlimited. They always have a limit defined.

* Always consider the Operating System you are using for your site. Usually, Windows web hosts offer access to a large number of technologies, which are not available with Linux or UNIX web hosts.

* Never compromise with quality because of price. If your financial resources allow you try to keep your budget flexible enough in order to get the best services.

* Change your web host only when it is an emergency or else there is not need of such change.

* Check out the type of domain name services provided by the web hosting company. For search engine rules, related and significant domain name with that of the website and its goal is very important.

* Opt for a web host that can provide you a great deal of information on SEO or Search Engine Optimization, since the ranking of your website depends on its SEO in the major search engines such Google, Yahoo and MSN.

* There are numerous web hosting directories that can give you detailed information about such web hosting companies that provide a great deal of services. Find out each and every type of services provided by these companies. Even consider the project that have completed and read client reviews before opting for them.




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