Tips for Choosing a Web Host
At one ’me you may have not put much thought who you chose as your web hosting company. In recent months this has all changed. As you may have seen companies such as Hostgator have been experiencing tons of outages and down ’me. This has seriously impacted their performance and reliability issues. It also leaves the question about just who you should use when it comes to choosing a web host.
There are several things that you will want to consider before making your final decision. Items that are important include:
• The type of website you are planning on hosting: business, personal, ecommerce
• How many websites you want to host
• Any special scripts or software that you need to use
• Price point
• Location of servers – this can have an impact on customer downloads
• How many uploads and downloads you expect to do per month
• Amount of traffic to your site
The most important factors include knowing how many websites you will be hosting, your business type and any special requirements for scripts. For example if you are planning on just hosting a personal blog you will need less bandwidth than someone who wants to run an ecommerce site.
One thing to always remember is that you can always upgrade your plan as your site and business grow. So you can start off with a small plan that allows you to host just one domain and then upgrade to a larger plan in a few months.
But if you know that you are planning on running a large business related website, it doesn’t hurt to have more than enough capacity from the beginning. This will reduce any issues of dealing with site down times, if you suddenly get huge spikes in traffic from running a sale.
Hosting your website is going to cost money and if you have a ’ght budget, take this into consideration. After comparing several plans you may decide to rearrange your budget and make funds available for hosting. After all, if your sites are down you won’t be making any money. Web hosting is also a business expense that can be deducted when you do your yearly taxes.
Once you know how many sites you want to host and their purpose you can start comparing some of the top hosting companies. Features to look at include bandwidth, number of domains, guaranteed up times, disk space, PHP, I click installs and more.
