Wednesday 23 October 2013

What To Look For In Website Hosting Services

By Edmund Goney


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.

But how do you go about with selecting website hosting? There are many factors that come into play with regards to picking the right host for your site. However, the most important of these factors are bandwidth, disk space, uptime, customer support, and pricing.

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.

When you search for website hosting, you may be tempted by proposals that include 100GB of disk space for your website. Unlimited disk space proposals are common as well. Still, you should bear in mind that a typical blog or newsletter-type website will never consume more than 20MB of space. The only time you'll find it necessary to have gigabytes' worth of space is if you intend to upload video and audio on your site.

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.

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.

Choosing hosting for your business website can be tricky. But as long as you carefully look at the factors that matters the most to your site, you can always get a good website hosting service.




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