You’re ready to start your blog or create a website for your business. One of the most important steps is to find a reliable web hosting service. Don’t just choose the cheapest web host. You’ll pay through the nose if your web hosting service sucks. What do you lose in sales when your customers can’t access your site? How much time and money will you spend recovering your data if your site is attacked by hackers? A good web host, on the other hand, will enable you to reach people from all over the world, and offer you great tools (like e-carts) to get your online business going. Here are some tips to help you find one.
Kinds of web hosting
In general, you will find three types of web host services. Dedicated server hosting, as the name implies, gives you a exclusive use of a computer to store your files and content. This is better for big companies or for those who have very sensitive data. Shared server hosting, on the other hand, has several websites running on a single server. It’s more affordable and can usually meet the needs of bloggers or small businesses. Free server hosting is, of course, free. This is really best for personal websites—if you can tolerate the ads.
Check the reliability of the web hosting service
You have to consider the uptime—there’s nothing more irritating and inefficient than a website that’s always down. And people are very unforgiving. You could spend good money on link marketing, but if readers can’t access your page then they’ll just close the window and move on. They will not come back.
You can check out user reviews on websites like webhostinggeeks.com and web-hosting-review.com
Review the features offered in the web hosting package
What kind of tools do you think you would need? A forum? A shopping cart? Blogging software? Also consider the storage and bandwidth. Will you be uploading a lot of heavy files, or using mostly straightforward text?
Check the customer support
Ideally the web hosting services should have reliable customer support that you can contact any time of the day, any day of the week. You can try checking objective reviews for the web hosting provider, or ask for the clients or websites that they host and then contacting the website owners yourself about their experience.
Consider what you’ll want in 5 years
When you evaluate a web host, don’t just think about what you want the website to be right now. What will your data and tool requirements be in one year, three years, five years? It’s a headache to migrate content to another web host, so you might as well sign up for a web hosting service that can accommodate your website’s direction and growth.
Photo from myinternetaccess.net