WEB HOSTING | GOWEBLIVE.COM
Author - Tim Weber, GoWebLive.com
Has your website passed the design and development stage? Is it ready to be launched? Are you looking for a hosting company but having trouble in making your selection? If yes, then this article is a good read for you as it will highlight some of the important factors for choosing a site hosting company for your business. However, let’s first take a look at how these hosting companies actually work.
Web hosts have their own servers with fast internet connection. They offer clients like you, space on their servers to upload and manage your site files/web pages. The uploaded files are accessible through a domain name which is registered through a domain registration service provider. The domain is linked to your site files at the web hosting company.
Now when your visitors enter your domain, your site pages are displayed to the users through the hosting company.
When you decide to shop for a site hosting service provider, you’ll come across two categories, free hosting and paid hosting. By looking at the two terms it is easy to figure out the basic difference that one is free and the other is paid but there is more to it than this.
A free hosting service provider will usually require you to place adverts on your site, offer limited space, and offer low bandwidth. This is usually offered by web design companies in their design offer like free web hosting for 1 year.
On the other hand, we say a paid hosting is much better. These service providers offer various hosting packages with different value added features like extra space, multiple domain, email accounts, site creation tools, sub-domain names and more bandwidth.
With so many hosting companies online, it may get challenging for you to choose one. To make things easy for you, here’s what you need to look for in a hosting company:
Before you choose a hosting service, make sure it offers high speed bandwidth and server security. Some hosting companies only focus on fetching customers and tend to over sell and since they allow too many sites on one server, due to the load, the speed goes down and causes the server to crash. So, it makes it difficult for users to access your site.
Always choose a hosting service with a good customer support so that if there is any issue, it can be addressed and resolved in the shortest possible time. To check if the support service is as good as the hosting service claims it to be, test it by shooting some emails to the support department to see how fast they reply.
Find out if the hosting service has latest software to keep their server patched and updated. This is to ensure that the hosting company has taken adequate measures to prevent viruses from attacking their server, because the server failure can hinder your site’s accessibility and if customers can't view your site, they will go to the second best option.
This is the running time of your website. Choose a reliable hosting service that actually offers 99.99% server uptime. Many claim this, but they don’t fulfill it so the best way to find out if the host provides a 99.99% server uptime is to research online, read customer reviews and visits forums to see what the experienced users have to say about the host and its services. This will help you with your search to find a reliable hosting service for your business website.
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