Monday, December 17, 2012

Website Hosting : Factors to Consider Before You Sign Up

By Lynne Alexiou


When you're constructing a company website, it is vital that you pick the right website hosting. Even though your website is an expression of just how good your products and services are, its quality will not be showcased properly if its host is not performing up to par. You will not be able to penetrate your intended market, not to mention convince them to purchase your products, if your host fails to render your site properly, experiences frequent downtime, or spams your pages with annoying banner ads. Thus, you should never take for granted the task of selecting a good hosting service for your site.

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 amount of bandwidth your website hosting has allocated for your website and how this bandwidth is allotted will matter a lot to how your website performs. Bandwidth refers to the data transferred from your site to its visitors. At first, your website will only need less than 3GB bandwidth. But you will need more as your site grows. You should find out how much bandwidth your host lets you use and how much you'd have to pay whenever you exceed your allocated bandwidth. Always beware of unlimited bandwidth offers. Nothing is really free or unlimited with web hosting.

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.

When it comes to website hosting, you must also take a look at the host's uptime. The uptime your host guarantees should never be under 99.9%. Can you reasonably expect your targeted audience to go to your site if they can't even load your pages? How much downtime your website gets is a huge deal, and a 99.9% uptime still equates with downtime of eight hours annually. If your host needs to go down, it should let you know immediately. Moreover, it should compensate you for the bother in an effort to keep you happy.

The website hosting you pick additionally ought to have considerable documentation for support purposes as well as several customer service channels that you can tap whenever you need assistance with your site. You must be able to contact your host's customer support whenever you require it because a problem can spring up with your website when you least expect it. Your host's support channels should include telephone, live chat and email, and use of these channels must be available to you without any trouble.

Last, but not the least, your website hosting has to offer a reasonable price package. With business websites, free hosting is entirely out of the question. For less than $10 a month, it's entirely possible for you to enjoy excellent regular hosting. But you must be certain that you're receiving what you paid for when you subscribe to the host's service.

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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1 comment:

  1. That's right. But I want to suggest also the security the web host could assure to your websites. It is very important factor to consider also. Thanks for the info.
    web hosting company

    ReplyDelete