Website Hosting : What You Need To Know

By Myrna Shigo





When you're constructing a company website, it is vital that you pick the right website hosting. Even though your website is an expression of just how good your products and services are, its quality will not be showcased properly if its host is not performing up to par. You will not be able to penetrate your intended market, not to mention convince them to purchase your products, if your host fails to render your site properly, experiences frequent downtime, or spams your pages with annoying banner ads. Thus, you should never take for granted the task of selecting a good hosting service for your site.



Nonetheless, how can you pick a good website hosting service? You should sift through numerous characteristics when assessing possible hosts for your business website. The essential traits you need to look for when you select hosting, though, are bandwidth, the amount of disk space allotted for your site, the uptime percentages guaranteed by the host, customer service efficiency, and how much the hosting costs.



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.



A lot of website hosting companies attract clients by offering big disk space packages. Usually, the disk space bundled in the package can be as big as 100GB. There are even companies that give unlimited disk space. However, you don't really require more than 20MB of disk space. The exception is if you will be putting up videos and podcasts on your website.



Yet another crucial item you should check out when you select website hosting is its uptime. Anything lower than 99.9% uptime is absolutely unacceptable. Remember: If your website is frequently unavailable, your visitors will not be able to see what you have there. The amount of downtime your website receives can greatly impact your business. After all, a 99.9% uptime will still mean a downtime amounting to eight hours yearly. In case your host has to take its servers down for any length of time, you must be informed of it as soon as possible. More than that, the host has to give you some compensation in return to show that they value doing business with you.



Your chosen website hosting should also have extensive support documentation and multiple channels of customer support for whenever you need help regarding your website. You will never know when you'd have an issue with your website, so it's important that you have can access this help you need 24/7. You should be able to contact the host's customer support via live chat, telephone or email without any hassles.



Last, but not the least, your website hosting has to offer a reasonable price package. With business websites, free hosting is entirely out of the question. For less than $10 a month, it's entirely possible for you to enjoy excellent regular hosting. But you must be certain that you're receiving what you paid for when you subscribe to the host's service.



Selecting what host to go for when you build your business website can be a challenge. But you know what? If you weigh your choices conscientiously and consider the things that are most important to your website, it won't be hard at all for you to find good-quality website hosting.









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