Sunday, 2 December 2012

How Should You Pick The Best Website Hosting For Your Site?

By Kristian Scharping


Your choice of website hosting is crucial if you're building a website for your business. While it is true that a well-designed website can speak a lot for the quality of the products and services you provide, your website is often only as good as its web host. You won't reach your target audience, much less be able to influence them to patronize your business, if your host loads your pages slowly, is always down, or fills your site with distracting ads. So, it's extremely important that you choose a good host for your website.

Nonetheless, how can you pick a good website hosting service? You should sift through numerous characteristics when assessing possible hosts for your business website. The essential traits you need to look for when you select hosting, though, are bandwidth, the amount of disk space allotted for your site, the uptime percentages guaranteed by the host, customer service efficiency, and how much the hosting costs.

The performance of your website is hugely affected by how much bandwidth your website hosting has allowed you to use. When we say "bandwidth," we talk about how much information gets moved from your website to whichever computer opens your site. Your site will initially require around 3GB of bandwidth or so. However, you are more likely to require more bandwidth as your website gets more traffic. It is important that you know your bandwidth allocation and the additional costs you'd shoulder upon exceeding that allowance. Stay away from any proposals involving unlimited bandwidth. There is no such thing as free lunch, even with hosting services.

A lot of website hosting companies attract clients by offering big disk space packages. Usually, the disk space bundled in the package can be as big as 100GB. There are even companies that give unlimited disk space. However, you don't really require more than 20MB of disk space. The exception is if you will be putting up videos and podcasts on your website.

Uptime is another extremely vital factor to consider when choosing website hosting. Your host should offer no less than 99.9% uptime. Really, how can your audience visit your site if it is always down? A 99.9% uptime still translates to around eight hours of downtime every year, and that can mean a lot for your business. Your host should notify you promptly if it has to schedule a downtime and should offer a refund or token as a form of goodwill gesture.

Does your selected website hosting possess extensive documentation and several channels for reaching after-sales support? It's a must for them to have this. You can encounter troubles with your website any given time of the day; thus, you should be able to get help from your host whenever it is necessary, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Contacting your host via telephone, email or live chat should not be troublesome at all for you.

Lastly, the website hosting you go for must have competitive pricing. Free hosting is never an option with business websites. You can find good-quality standard hosting for only $10 per month. Just make sure that you are really getting the services promised to you once you sign up for the hosting service.

Picking the right hosting for your website is not an easy task. Still, you won't have to worry about your website hosting if you took the effort to evaluate your choices with utmost care.




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