Monday, 14 October 2013

Factors To Consider When Choosing Website Hosting

By Una Zou


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.

When you search for website hosting, you may be tempted by proposals that include 100GB of disk space for your website. Unlimited disk space proposals are common as well. Still, you should bear in mind that a typical blog or newsletter-type website will never consume more than 20MB of space. The only time you'll find it necessary to have gigabytes' worth of space is if you intend to upload video and audio on your site.

When it comes to website hosting, you must also take a look at the host's uptime. The uptime your host guarantees should never be under 99.9%. Can you reasonably expect your targeted audience to go to your site if they can't even load your pages? How much downtime your website gets is a huge deal, and a 99.9% uptime still equates with downtime of eight hours annually. If your host needs to go down, it should let you know immediately. Moreover, it should compensate you for the bother in an effort to keep you happy.

The website hosting you pick additionally ought to have considerable documentation for support purposes as well as several customer service channels that you can tap whenever you need assistance with your site. You must be able to contact your host's customer support whenever you require it because a problem can spring up with your website when you least expect it. Your host's support channels should include telephone, live chat and email, and use of these channels must be available to you without any trouble.

And finally, cost matters when it comes to choosing website hosting. The service you get should have an affordable price tag. Never even think about free hosting if you're putting up a business website; it's definitely inappropriate. You don't have to spend much on hosting at all. There are a lot of web hosts that offer quality service for $10 or so monthly. However, before you avail of any web hosting, you have to be absolutely confident that you're obtaining more than your money's worth.

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.




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