It is impossible to overestimate the importance and value of web site hosting for your online business, for your blog or site. Simply put – it’s everything for you. No matter if you are choosing free hosting with ftp or special kind of hosting crafted for your needs – the knowledge is power.
If the hosting is down, no matter how huge is your current incoming traffic, no matter how great is your salescopy or price or marketing approach to the visitor – the site/blog is dead.
That is why it’s crucially important to understand how to find and choose quality webhosting so that you can focus on your business, instead of heating up the support call lines.
We will share our knowledge how to choose the right type of the hosting, but first let’s quickly cover the hosting basics, so that people who just start their Internet activity understand what we are talking about.
Web host services allow individuals and organizations to create their websites and blogs in the World Wide Web. The hosting companies connect their web servers to the internet.
Hosting companies have a ’server space’ in some physical center called ‘data center’ – it should be a 24/7 secure environment with HVAC temperature control, virus detection software, excellent backup, huge team of support and technical admins, etc.
Usually there is a typical choice between a free hosting with ftp and a paid web host service. If you want to have full freedom for your online business and do not want extra stuff like unnecessary advertisements (not yours, the ads that are sold by the hosting company) popping up and distracting visitors from the information and your products – then choose a paid web host service.
The hosting can come in the form of:
In technical terms there are two types of the platforms for hosting a website – Windows and Linux.
Ok, the techy basics are over, now let’s find out the secrets of choosing a quality and reliable web site hosting.
First of all, when choosing a hosting service you choose a hosting company. A reliable hosting company should be on the market for 5+ years. Of course, there can be a fresh company that just started and does a great job and gives lots of teasers like free hosting with ftp, but when you go to the hosting forums where users share their feedback, you will see that you can choose from the companies that have YEARS of excellent support and service quality vs new companies. Whom would you choose?
Only then start paying attention to the hosting rates offered by the hosting companies and choosing the most affordable hosting plans.
Why does the quality come over the price? Because the price can be very low, but it can be because of the hosting company to save money on staff (support and tech admins), and this means if your site gets down it can take you days or – the worst case scenario – weeks before the site is up and running again. With companies that have great feedback these issues are handled in hours. Now you see why the number of years on the market play huge importance for choosing a hosting service provider – if you see hundreds of unbiased people saying that tech support is really fast at hosting company XYZ, then this XYZ is really worth paying, and paying more.
Also make sure that your hosting company continuously improves security measures and any e-commerce transaction should be covered under SSL. This is also about making sure that the hosting company is properly protected by firewalls.
Ask a question whether your hosting company will host your website on Windows or Linux operating system. Your site might have some scripts (Internet marketing tools or SEO scripts or anything else) that need either Linux or Windows. Usually this will not be a problem to switch your account from Windows to Linux or from Linus to Windows, but it is always better to double check this issue.
As you can see – the rule of a thumb is to check whether the hosting company has great tech support. Don’t mix that up with sales support. Usually hosting companies have live chats on the site where a client who just plans to buy this hosting will get a supersonic-quick answer. But these people have nothing to do with the technical support, they are just there to close the sale. I have personally experienced with some companies terrifically quick answers in the live chats on the ’selling part’ or the site and nearly complete ignore on the tech support when the sites have been down for over 72 hours without any reply.
For more tips about choosing quality web site hosting please read other posts on the blog. To get new info, please save our Free Webhosting Expert RSS feed.
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