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How to ChooseWeb Hosting Company? |
by:
Karolis Petreikis |
Nowadays, anybody can afford to orderfeature-packed web hosting plan for next to nothing; however, affordable price is notonly criterion which should be considered when purchasing web hosting services. In this article, I'll explainbasics of what you should look for in choosingweb hosting company, not just concentrating onbest price and features, but also on reliability and honesty. You are investing your money and effort into finding paying customers and you would not like to lose them in order to savefew dollars per month onweb hosting service.
When looking forweb hosting company, it doesn’t matter if this is just forinception ofweb ormove ofestablished site; you need to considerlarge selection of criteria to determine which company to go with:
Customer support
Website hosting service isn’t just storage or bandwidth. Based on personal experience and that of others, eventop-notch service is worthless without customer support. If you ownbusiness website, your hosting provider needs to be there for you twofour/seven and give you instant access totechnicians you need to solve your problem; otherwise, you may end up losing customers and money.
Downtime guarantee and service monitoring
Havingpersonal website go down isminor inconvenience; havingbusiness website go down isserious matter. What amount of profit would you lose if your site had been down forweek? Long downtime may be very harmful to today's companies which spend large amounts of money on advertising their websites. Essentially, there are two rules regarding reliability that one should look at:
one. You should check if there isuptime guarantee offered. A truly service-oriented provider will also givemoney-back guarantee, offeringdiscount or free service as compensation for downtime. Any company which avoids taking responsibility will not put much effort intoservice.
two. I definitely would not go withcompany claiming onezerozero% uptime, as there is no such thing asserver with onezerozero% uptime. If anyone ever claims their server hasonezerozero% uptime they are either lying or they do not performnecessary upgrades that preventmachine from being compromised.
Reputable web hosts will post statistics on their site: What isfrequency of interruption? How aboutaverage percentage of downtime? If these aren’t posted, ask; ifanswer isn’t forthcoming, that should bewarning sign. If you still go withhost which doesn't monitor servers, you'll have to domonitoring yourself. I recommend http://www.siteuptime.com, as it's one ofbest monitoring services available for free inmarket today.
Backups
There is no host which is safe against different types of technical and programical failures, so make sure thatcompany runs scheduled backups. The other advice would be always havingbackup of your website yourself, as you never know what might happen. cPanel, which ismost popular web hosting management software at this time, hasvery comfortable backup-making tool. It allows you to backup files and databases quickly and easily, so backups are no longerproblem.
Acceptable use policy
Web hosts may have twozerozero-threezerozero or more clients per server; there is no exact number, as companies have different hardware and each hosted website has different resource usage. There always ispossibility thatfew of those customers host illegal content. There are web hosts who have had their servers unplugged, resulting in their clients’ websites going down. I am sure you do not want to put your business at risk and have your website hosted onsame server together with illegal pornography and software sites, so check host's acceptable use policy to find out, ifhost takes care of what's hosted on their servers.
Hosting your site onuncared-for server will also result inlow speed. If somebody onsame server sends spam,server's IP address will be blacklisted and you'll have serious problems as recipients stop receiving your emails. Use"Spam database lookup" feature on www.DNSstuff.com to check ifweb hosting company is blacklisted. Spam is being sent almost everywhere, so having one or two red records is not that bad; but, if there are more, it may becomeproblem later on.
Unlimited bandwidth and web space
In web hosting industry,adage "you get what you pay for" is almost universally applicable. Do not fall for hosts offering unlimited allowances, as there is no unlimited bandwidth, nor unlimited web space. Host's pay for each GB of bandwidth themselves. Hard drives also aren't free, so how can they say it's unlimited? They simply are performing false advertising in order to attract customers. The average website doesn't use more than oneGB of bandwidth per month;customer is happy as he bought something "unlimited" andhost getsnew customer, which will not cost them any more than $one-two USD per month. But imagine what would happen if I hadwebsite, burning much more bandwidth thanaverage site does, and I signed up withhosting company offering unlimited traffic? The host would simply suspend my account and tell me, that it was using too much bandwidth. There even are companies which offer unlimited bandwidth and havestatement on their terms of service, explaining that unlimited bandwidth means fourzeroGB, for example.
Will you really own your domain name?
When you buydomain name together withwebsite hosting package, make surehost will registerdomain name under your name. It usually should be written in their FAQ, but, if there is no such information, simply contact them. This will also give youopportunity to check how fast their customer support team replies to inquiries. Ifhosting company registers domains under someone else's name, you may have problems switching hosting providers later. If you were in such situation, you would have to file forUniform Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP), which costs much more than both domain name and web hosting service together.
Control Panel
For ease of maintenance,feature calledControl Panel isnecessity; this tool will normally allow for regular maintenance, be it email mailbox additions/deletions, password resets, web additions, web count reports, statistics and so on. Ifsite is for any sort of business, this isabsolute must. The most popular web hosting management software currently available is cPanel. It'snext-generation web hosting control panel system that allows you to manage your domain throughweb interface. The idea is to transfer as much ofcontrol of managing your web site to you; you haveability to manage all aspects of e-mail, files, backup, FTP, CGI scripts, and web site statistics.
Value-added services
Hosting companies offer different value-added services in order to set themselves apart fromcompetition. Of course, these areadvantage, butcommon mistake customers make is choosinghost just because it offers many value-added services which will not be used anyway. Some ofreally useful features are:
one. Auto-installer script – Auto-installers will save you time if you are going to installforum, image gallery, content management system, etc. Installation procedures onauto-installer script take seconds and can be performed by novices withoutneed of doing difficult tasks usually associated with installations.
two. Online website builder - It lets you designwebsite infew minutes without having any creation software and knowledge. One very powerful website builder onmarket is Site Studio; this editor allows for ease of use, full control of color schemes and themes, one-click publishing, andarray of templates to use.
The last tip
In this article, I've mentioned onlyfew warning signs which are worth considering. You should know yourself that price and allocations aren't as important asquality of service; ifbudget is absolutely limited, thenprice can bevalid criterion, but otherwise it shouldn’t receive much credence.
By going through this article and asking questions, you can narrow downlist of web hosts topoint wheregood, sound decision can be easily made.
Aboutauthor:
Karolis Petreikis isCEO of http://www.uphosted.com-company that provides reliable hosting services for both individuals and businesses.
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