Choosing the right web hosting provider is one of the most crucial decisions of a webmaster. A poor web hosting service provider can be your worst nightmare, so this guide will be very useful for beginners. Here are the golden rules:
1. Amount of web space: Consider your required amount of space carefully, especially if your website has lots of videos or rich in graphics. You might want to expand your space tomorrow and be sure that your web hosting company could be able to provide more space. Also, watch out for “unlimited disk space” claims, there may be more to it than meets the eye, and you may soon find out that “unlimited” doesn’t really mean “unlimited”.
2. Bandwidth/Data Transfer: Data transfer is the amount of bytes transferred from your site to visitors when they browse your site. After you decide on the amount of web space you need, you need to consider sufficient bandwidth for efficient data transfer. Again, beware of “unlimited bandwidth” claims, there is always a limitation. To give you an idea, a typical traffic requirement is usually less than 3 GB of bandwidth per month.
2. Bandwidth/Data Transfer: Data transfer is the amount of bytes transferred from your site to visitors when they browse your site. After you decide on the amount of web space you need, you need to consider sufficient bandwidth for efficient data transfer. Again, beware of “unlimited bandwidth” claims, there is always a limitation. To give you an idea, a typical traffic requirement is usually less than 3 GB of bandwidth per month.
3. Site Builder: If you don’t know anything about programming or making websites, you may need an easy site builder system. Be sure that your web hosting provider has one for you to use.
4. Reliability, security and speed of access: They are extremely important for all online businesses. If your site goes down or is not available, you will lose many visitors, and worst of all, potential customers. So how do you know if a web hosting company is reliable? Ask other customers and read comments and feedback left about the company. Look for a hosting site with 99.5% or higher uptime. No hosting company can guarantee 100% uptime. If anyone says so, make sure you investigate their claims first.
Besides, you have to be very cautious about security; especially if you have an e-commerce website. Your customers will expect security from you. You will definitely need SSL if you want to collect credit card payments on your site.
Test the speed of a host’s network to your location by clicking (for windows users) Start, Run,Type in “command” and Enter, and then type “ping hostdomainname.com”. Wait for it to finish and look for the average ping. The lower the number the better, the faster your site will load. Averaging around an 80 ms could be considered good. You may also want to check if the company is legit by doing a WHOIS for the company’s domain name.
5. Customer Support: Inquire carefully about their support services. Do they provide 24/7 support? Do they provide your preferred contact method, be it telephone, email, or chat support? Check out their FAQ and help pages. Do they charge for support or is it free? How rapidly will they respond to your inquiry? These are all important questions to be answered. Avoid a host immediately that has a poor customer service reputation.
You can even test their support before joining. Make sure you call the technical support department; often Sales departments have better response time, which may give you the wrong idea. And is it in-house Customer Support or is it outsourced? Often an outsourced support department doesn’t have the in-depth knowledge, skills or even the access they need to help you with your problems.
6. Pricing: It’s not necessarily true that most expensive service is the best one. Compare prices and services and decide accordingly. Most web hosts allow you to select an annual payment plan that gives you a cheaper rate than if you were to pay monthly.
7. Email services: Get an email through your domain name. It looks more professional and official and helps you to stay in touch with your visitors. Investigate the email services provided by your hosting company. Do they support POP3 or IMAP4 or only offer webmail? Do they offer Hosted Exchange or Business-Grade email? How many email addresses are provided with their web hosting plans? Can you set an email address to automatically reply (auto responder) or forwarded to your existing e-mail address? Make sure they have all the features you’re looking for in an email host.
8. Logs: All the good hosting services provide you website logs. So you can manage your statistics and monitor your website accordingly. Make sure that at least raw log files are provided.
9. Web Hosting Features: Make sure that your hosting plan has all the features you need to get your site up and running properly. FTP access provides the ability to upload new pages. If you are using personal web builder, FTP access is crucial for you. FTP provides more flexibility when managing your website. Also, if your web site is built with any server side scripting features, make sure you host supports the scripting language you are using, be it ASP or ASP.NET, PHP, Perl and so on. Also chances are that you’ll need a database tool as well, such as Microsoft SQL or MySQL.
10. Control Panel: The Control Panel allows you to manage different aspects of your web account by yourself, such as changing passwords or managing features and add-ons. If you don’t want to call their technical support all the time, you definitely need an extensive control panel.
No comments:
Post a Comment