Tips For Choosing The Right Web Host

Choosing the right web hosting company is one of the most important decisions you will make regarding your Internet business. When selecting a hosting company, there are many factors to consider. Make sure to follow these four tips for choosing a hosting company for your website.

1. Know Your Needs
You need to have some idea of what your web hosting needs are before you start shopping around for a web hosting company. The cost of different web hosting packages will vary based on size requirements and bandwidth capacity, so a web hosting company won’t be able to give you a price estimate without this information.

2. Reliability of the Hosting Company
Before you select a hosting company, you need to know how reliable that company is. If you ask any web hosting company whether or not it is reliable, the answer will of course be yes.

The question you need to ask is about downtime. You need to know how much downtime the web hosting company experiences. You also need to find out if the quoted expectation for downtime includes regularly scheduled maintenance or not.

Remember that when the web host is down, the Internet component of your business is down time. If prospective customers can’t find you online when they are ready to buy, they will find what they need from someone else. When it comes to Internet business, downtime is money lost.

3. Reputation of the Hosting Company
One of the great things about the Internet is how easy it is to access information online. There are a number of forums online that appeal to webmasters and website owners. When you are searching for a web hosting company, visiting these forums can be an invaluable source for information about web hosting companies.

When you find an active forum where those who are knowledgeable about web hosting are posting, look for threads that are related to web hosting. If you don’t see recent posts on the topic, post a question yourself. You may get some ideas about which web hosting companies are the best. You’ll definitely learn about some of the ones you want to avoid!

4. Customer Service
You will want to go with a web hosting company that has available and responsive customer service. The first thing you should do is look at the website of a hosting company you are considering. Check out the options for customer service. If you have a difficult time finding customer service information posted on the website, that is a good sign that you are going to have trouble getting help when you need it.

Ideally, you want to select a web hosting company that offers 24 hour customer service with multiple ways of requesting help. Many of the best hosting companies offer live chat help, e-mail technical support, and a toll-free technical support phone number.

However, just because a web hosting company has customer service contact information posted does not mean that the company actually provides customer service. Before you make your final decision, use the customer service contact methods to see what kind of response you actually get. If you don’t get a live person, or a quick response, keep looking for another company.

Web Hosting For Beginners

For many people using the internet is a daily occurrence, whether it be for work or leisure, shopping or gaining information. While many of these people are confident in how to use the internet, and what it can do for them, there are also many people who have no idea of how it works, or what they would need to do to get their own website.

Every single website on the internet, be it the one page site of an individual or a huge, multi-page website of an international company, has the same principle behind them. In order for their website to be visible to the millions of internet users it must be displayed through the services of a web hosting company. Web hosting is basically the process of providing a service which enables your website to be viewed online. This can only be done by these service providers as it is only them who have computers, much like your own, which are directly connected to the internet. These computers are used solely to serve up websites onto the internet, lending them their official name of “servers”.

The web host will generally host many thousands of web sites and as such they require a very fast connection to the internet. They have a set amount of access to the internet, which they rent out to people who want their own online web site. As the internet has grown in popularity, the renting of space has become financially rewarding. As such, more companies are trying to get involved in it. You may find that you are dealing with the company that owns that main server directly, or you may find you are renting your space from a company who, in turn, are renting their space from a larger web hosting company. In this case, the server of the smaller company is linked to the server of the larger company, so it is the larger company who actually enable your website to be viewed online. It is really inconsequential to the website owner whether they are dealing with the main company directly or a smaller subsidiary as the end result is the same.

This information is just the basics of how the internet and web sites work. In order to have your own web site you need to do more than just rent space from a web hosting company. For example, you will need to create the site itself, either personally or by hiring the services of a professional. However, whatever you do to make your web site vibrant, attractive or interesting will be totally useless without ensuring you have paid a web hosting company to actually put it online for you.

Choosing Your Webhost

Not every web hosting plan is built alike, nor is every web hosting provider. When you start shopping around for your next web hosting provider, there are certain criteria you’ll want to hone in on, namely: disk space, bandwidth, upload/download speeds, security and reliability, customer service, references/testimonials, and guarantees. We’ll take them one by one below.

Disk Space and Bandwidth
Disk space is the storage space your web hosting provider allows you for all the files that make up your website (from image galleries to databases to HTML and ASP docs, etc.). Bandwidth is the amount of data transfer your web hosting provider permits you in a given period (usually a month). It’s disk space that determines how rich and elaborate your site can be. It’s bandwidth that determines how much traffic you can accommodate. Gauge properly for the best results — in other words, don’t spend a bundle for more than you need, but get yourself more than enough to allow for the traffic (and the growth) you anticipate in your best-case scenarios.

Upload/Download Speeds
When someone visits your website online, how long will it take the page to load? The answer to this question alone — and the consistency with which you and your web hosting provider maintain it — can be the singular point that makes or breaks your business. People have short attention spans, made even shorter on the web. The longer you keep them waiting, the more likely they’ll stop waiting.

Security and Reliability
The servers and other equipment that a web hosting provider uses to run your website are housed in a building called a data center. This data center needs to be as secure as possible to protect your equipment — your entire business is at stake. This means 24/7 365 monitoring by live, trained security personnel and security cameras. Certain precautions must be taken in order to keep the equipment functioning properly in case of emergency, like power outages, fire, and other natural disasters. This comes in the form of redundant backup power sources and fuel supplies to ensure uninterruptible power, state-of-the-art smoke and fire detection, alerting, and suppression technologies, and redundant environmental controls (ie. air conditioning systems).

Customer Service
Is it 24/7 365? Is it all free, or only certain services? Or is none of it free? Can you talk to a human being by toll-free telephone? In what areas? (A European toll-free number might not be accessible from the U.S., for example.) Does the web hosting provider use email query tickets or live chat or both? How extensive are their user guides, tutorials, and help docs? Do they use Flash or streaming audio/video or are all of their help guides merely text based?

Testimonials
Who likes them? A smart sales site will feature customer testimonials on its very own page. To find out who dislikes a web hosting provider, however, you’ll have to do a little broader internet research. Just keep in mind however, if you look for complaints, you’ll probably find them. A web hosting provider is not immune from the old adage that you can’t please all the people all the time. So take complaints with a grain of salt, and read them carefully. Could the issue have been the customer’s fault, was it something that was out of the web hosting provider’s hands altogether, or was it a misunderstanding of policy or technology or some other form of miscommunication? Far too often the only type of feedback a company will get is negative. If an individual is inspired to give positive feedback, it should be given due weight.

Guarantees
Just like you need to test drive a new car before you commit to buying it, you should be able to try out a web hosting provider and their services before committing to having your site hosted by them. Rarely (though occasionally) will this come in the form of a free trial. More often than not, it’ll come in the form of a money-back guarantee. Fine with us. 30 days is the minimum. 90 is especially nice.

A good web hosting provider will also usually offer some sort of uptime guarantee, meaning the percentage of the time your site is guaranteed to be live when a visitor tries to visit it. The best ones go from 99.95% to 99.9999%. As long as they have one in the 99% range, you can feel somewhat secure.

One last guarantee you’ll often see is a Custom Support Response Time guarantee (though it may not be worded quite that way). This tells you have quickly they vow to have a support representative respond (either by phone, live chat, or email) to a “support ticket” or “email query” you submit. 24 hours is acceptable, though you’ll see 48 and 72 sometimes as well. 3 hour response guarantees are rare, and precious.

Upgrade/Downgrade Policies
Are they free? For how long (one year, life)? What if you discover you’ve chosen the wrong plan for your needs, or you outgrow your existing plan, or you downsize? Don’t sign any contracts with any web hosting provider that locks you into one particular plan with no recourse should these situations arise. There’s no need to have to pay exorbitant fees to get out of one plan and into another. Especially when a decent web hosting provider will allow you to change plans whenever you need to and for whatever reason.