Selecting a hosting plan is a critical step when you want to start up a website. Prior posts from me were about domain name choice and website creation. Next we will discuss hosting: One of the critical decisions you will have to make is what type of hosting plan to use and what hosting provider to choose.
The next step after creating your website is to make it live on the internet, or publish it. In order to do so, you will need a hosting plan. By purchasing a domain name you have branded, or named your website. You own the name, but now you must pay rent to someone to actually get your website online. With a hosting plan you will be paying a service provider to publish your website on the internet for all to see. This article covers what to look for in a hosting plan.
SERVICE The most important consideration is the level of service provided. No consideration, including price, should supersede Good Customer Service as the criteria for choosing your hosting provider. If your website is not available on the internet you are losing opportunities to connect with customers. For that reason you want to be sure and choose a hosting provider that will provide the best uptime as well the best availability and quality of customer service.
UPTIME When shopping for a hosting company, find out if they have an uptime guarantee. The better hosting providers will offer up to 99% uptime. Even at 99% average uptime it can mean that your website will be off the internet for over 7 hours per month. If at all possible, choose a host guaranteeing up to 99.9% uptime.
SIZE How large will the website be? One of the determining factors for the price of most hosting plans is the amount of space required to store the website on their server’s hard drive. If your website will be media rich with videos or music or photo files, or a large e-commerce site with a lot of catalogue pages, you will have to take space into consideration as a criteria for choosing the right hosting plan.
LINUX OR WINDOWS This question refers to the operating systems available for hosting and which one to choose. BTW it does not matter what operating system you are using on your personal computer. What programming language was used in the Web site design? For example, if you designed a website using ASP or ASP.NET, you’ll need to find a Windows hosting plan. If you have a Web site that uses CGI or PHP, you’ll need to get a Linux hosting plan. Note that if you are simply publishing a basic html website, the choice of hosting Operating system won’t really matter as much until you get into more advanced languages such as PHP or ASP.
TRAFFIC Will you be expecting lots of visitors to your website? Most hosting providers sell their hosting plans on a sliding scale according to bandwith usage. The more visitors or traffic you expect on your site, the higher the bandwidth you will need, and the more the plan will cost. The best advice here is to start off with a low cost, low bandwidth plan and upgrade it later as the traffic to your website grows.
SHARED OR DEDICATED HOSTING The question of shared vs. dedicated hosting is really answered in a very simple way: A shared hosting plan is exactly as it sounds, and means that your website will be stored on a server along with lots of other websites. In this hosting format you generally have no ability to make changes to the resident software on the system, meaning you cannot change or upgrade the operating system, or the database management system, etc. You will have to work within the software structure provided by the hosting company. Dedicated or virtual dedicated hosting is different in the sense that you will have full control over the environment that your website resides in, and you will have the only access to that space. Dedicated server hosting gives you full control over setup of the operating system and auxilliary programs such as database management or shopping cart or database management software. This type of hosting is definitely geared to the more advanced user, and usually you won’t be able to get as much customer support because it will be a custom setup. The best advice I can give to the newbie is to use shared hosting at first, until you gain more experience and abilities and are ready to take the plunge into something as advanced as dedicated hosting.
At StartMyWebsiteToday.com our uptime guarantee is 99.9% and we offer 24/7 customer service. The hosting plans that are offered include a variety: shared hosting, virtual dedicated hosting, and dedicated hosting plans with either Linux or Windows operating systems for every need and budget ranging from the small personal website to large online multimedia sites to those interested in ecommerce website building. To review the options we offer, click HERE: Hosting plans.
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