So you think you want to start up a website. In prior posts I discussed choosing a domain name and creation of web pages. Which brings the subject of hosting into play: 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. 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. To make your website live on the internet you will be paying a service provider to publish it for you. That’s what a hosting plan is. The key considerations for choosing a good hosting plan will be discussed here.
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. 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. Strategically the best thing you can do for your website upfront is to choose a hosting company that is reliable in terms of customer service as well as “uptime”.
UPTIME When shopping for a hosting company, find out if they have an 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! If at all possible, choose a host guaranteeing up to 99.9% uptime.
SIZE What size, or how many pages will the website have? 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. Most websites do not require much space but if you’re planning on having a large site with a lot of multimedia content or an ecommerce site selling multiple items, you’ll probably need additional disk space on your 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. For the novice user who is building a simple html website the above may not be a consideration at first, but may become important later on as you become more experienced and add more features to your website.
TRAFFIC How much traffic or how many visitors do you expect monthly? 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. Usually the best way to proceed here is to start with a basic low bandwidth plan, and upgrade later as the traffic begins to flow to the website.
SHARED OR DEDICATED HOSTING Whether or not to choose shared hosting over dedicated hosting comes down to the following: First a brief description of shared hosting, which is sharing space on a server with dozens or perhaps hundreds of other websites. The main factor here is that you will have no control over the operating system, database structure, etc., and will have to work within the structure setup by the hosting provider. 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. In other words, you would determine what operating system to use, what type database management software, what type of blog software, what type shopping cart, etc., etc. 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 bottom line: start off with shared hosting if you are a beginner, until you are advanced enough to progress to your own controlled dedicated hosting environment.
At StartYourWebsiteToday.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 see what is available, click HERE: Hosting plans.
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Although shared hosting is a less expensive way for businesses to create a Web presence, it is usually not sufficient for Web sites with high traffic. These sites need a dedicated Web server, either provided by a Web hosting service or maintained in-house. With shared hosting, numerous web sites are sharing a single server.