How to Choose the Right Web Hosting Company
Need some answers to questions you are having with setting up your site? The questions most people have are, which web hosting company should I sign up for? How much bandwidth and disk space do I want for my website? And how much money do I need to spend? Well, there are literally thousands of similar web hosting companies all wrestling over your business. The great thing for you is that the cost is dropping in this industry, because of all the competitors, and many are becoming dramatically more respectable companies because of how meaningful their reviews are to their sales.
In all likelihood you are looking into how to pick the right web hosting service, you aren’t starting the next Yahoo, and are working with a smaller or medium sized website. So this is where we will begin. If you are going with a small site you are pretty safe going with a cheaper web hosting service. You don’t need a lot of disk space or bandwidth for a site like this. And most companies will let you upgrade easily when you want more.
Most of you are likely looking into web hosting for a small or medium sized business. For companies it is vital to predict your future needs. Growth is what all businesses want to achieve, so make sure you don’t limit yourself. More traffic means more bandwidth is required. More products to sell means you will require extra disk space. 100 MB of disk space is a safe place to begin, but make sure the host lets you upgrade. Remember to think about any possible expansion your business will experience. I love to have extra disk space to use for backing up files on my computer, disk space comes very cheap now. Bandwidth is determined by the amount of traffic your website will get each month. 1 GB of bandwidth is a fairly safe place to start, but again remember to make sure you can upgrade.
Other factors you should consider are email accounts, spam protection, site builders, support, site stats, additional domains, auto responders, uptime to mention a few. Many businesses will buy some of their traffic, so the uptime of your web host is nothing to joke about. If your website isn’t up then you are paying for nothing and that isn’t fun. It is unlikely you will find a company that guarantees 100% uptime, because every company needs to fix things from time to time, but look for one with 99.9 or 99.99%. Good technical support is vital for first time website owners. And if there is a problem you don’t want to have to wait a week to get it fixed. Email accounts are vital so you look more professional when writing an email. Using a gmail account when writing a business email doesn’t look to great. You should look for 20+ email accounts which is fairly easy to find now. A lot of companies offer unlimited accounts.
Site builders are a great addition if you don’t know how to make your own page, or if you are just lazy. The ability to host more than 1 domain is an exceptional bonus so you don’t have to set up a new hosting account if you want to add a domain. I would look for a web host that offers unlimited domains. Also look for a host that has CGI and MYSQL for databases. CGI access will allow you to run scripts from your website to interact with your visitors.
If you are here because you are developing a very large website then you are going to have to look for hosts that offer more bandwidth and more disk space. Dedicated hosting would be the way to go if you don’t mind spending more money. I will go into more depth about large sites in another article, mainly because 99% of people at that stage will not need help picking a host.
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