Wednesday, March 12, 2014

How To Choose The Best Website Hosting Available For Your Site

By Corrie Moeller


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.

The performance of your website is hugely affected by how much bandwidth your website hosting has allowed you to use. When we say "bandwidth," we talk about how much information gets moved from your website to whichever computer opens your site. Your site will initially require around 3GB of bandwidth or so. However, you are more likely to require more bandwidth as your website gets more traffic. It is important that you know your bandwidth allocation and the additional costs you'd shoulder upon exceeding that allowance. Stay away from any proposals involving unlimited bandwidth. There is no such thing as free lunch, even with hosting services.

Many website hosting services lure in potential customers with promises of huge disk space allocations for their websites, sometimes amounting to 100GB or even unlimited. But unless you would be hosting video and audio files, your website won't probably need more than 20MB of disk space.

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.

Does your selected website hosting possess extensive documentation and several channels for reaching after-sales support? It's a must for them to have this. You can encounter troubles with your website any given time of the day; thus, you should be able to get help from your host whenever it is necessary, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Contacting your host via telephone, email or live chat should not be troublesome at all for you.

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.




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