Sunday, March 9, 2014

Website Hosting : Factors To Consider Before You Sign Up

By Nathaniel Smelko


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.

But how do you go about with selecting website hosting? There are many factors that come into play with regards to picking the right host for your site. However, the most important of these factors are bandwidth, disk space, uptime, customer support, and pricing.

Your website's reach can depend greatly on how much bandwidth your website hosting has set aside for your utilization. Bandwidth is simply the amount of data that is transmitted from your website to the people or computers visiting it. Around 3GB worth of bandwidth is enough for your website, at least on its first few months. As your website becomes more popular, so would your need for additional bandwidth. The size of your bandwidth allowance and the price you'd shell out money for whenever you exceed this allocation should be clear to you. Don't believe anything you hear about hosts that give unlimited bandwidth options. There is always a limit to how much a web host can give you.

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.

Yet another crucial item you should check out when you select website hosting is its uptime. Anything lower than 99.9% uptime is absolutely unacceptable. Remember: If your website is frequently unavailable, your visitors will not be able to see what you have there. The amount of downtime your website receives can greatly impact your business. After all, a 99.9% uptime will still mean a downtime amounting to eight hours yearly. In case your host has to take its servers down for any length of time, you must be informed of it as soon as possible. More than that, the host has to give you some compensation in return to show that they value doing business with you.

Your chosen website hosting should also have extensive support documentation and multiple channels of customer support for whenever you need help regarding your website. You will never know when you'd have an issue with your website, so it's important that you have can access this help you need 24/7. You should be able to contact the host's customer support via live chat, telephone or email without any hassles.

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.

Choosing hosting for your business website can be tricky. But as long as you carefully look at the factors that matters the most to your site, you can always get a good website hosting service.




About the Author:



0 comments:

Post a Comment