Selecting a hosting plan is a critical step when you want to start up a website. In prior posts I discussed choosing a domain name and creation of web pages. Now let’s talk a little about 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. Publishing to the internet involves getting a hosting plan. A hosting plan is different from a domain name. You own your domain name but you rent a hosting plan. With a hosting plan you will be paying a service provider to publish your website on the internet for all to see. Let’s go over some of the key important factors to consider when choosing a hosting plan:
SERVICE First and foremost in your decision is to consider the hosting provider’s reputation for it’s services. No consideration, including price, should supersede Good Customer Service as the criteria for choosing your hosting provider. After you have published, or “gone live” on the internet, the last thing you want is for the website to go down and become unavailable to potential 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 What is the hosting company’s “uptime guarantee”? Many guarantee 99% uptime for their servers. That sounds great, but it does mean that your site could go down for 1% of the time, which means over 7 hours out of each month! The best hosting providers will have a track record of up to 99.9% uptime, which essentially guarantees you that downtime is negligible or even non-existent.
SIZE What size, or how many pages will the website have? The amount of disk space all of your website’s pages takes up will determine the size of the hosting plan you will need. 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? Hosting plans are usually sold at different level plans according to the bandwith that will be required. Bandwidth = Traffic. Obviously more bandwidth is better because it allows more visitors to visit your site, but at the beginning this will be hard for you to gauge. 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 Whether or not to choose shared hosting over dedicated hosting comes down to the following: 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. Using dedicated (or virtual dedicated) hosting means that you have full control over the server your website is stored on and that only your data occupies the space on that server. 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. We also have a selection of shared, dedicated, and virtual dedicated hosting plans to suit all budgets and sizes and types of websites. To review the options we offer, click HERE: Hosting plans.
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