What To Look For In Web Hosting

If you are starting a new website, affordable web hosting is a service you cannot do without. When we say web hosting, we are referring to the companies which provide space on their servers, bandwidth and networking equipment which enables your site to be on the web. Without a web host for your site, it doesn’t matter how much work you put into it; no one is going to see it unless it is online.

There are a lot of different web hosting companies out there, each of which offers a different array of packages and service options. Before you even begin looking for a web hosting company for your site, you need to sit down and carefully consider exactly what features you want your website to be able to offer.

Think about the features you website will need. You may want to host large files or offer streaming media, which means you’ll need a lot of disk space and a lot of bandwidth. Maybe you need ecommerce capabilities or scripting on your site. Write these needs down so that you have a checklist of what you’re looking for as you examine the different web hosting packages out there.

There are free hosting options available, but these are not really suitable if your website is for a business. These sites offer a very limited feature set and typically a very low bandwidth limit as well. Besides this, having a freely hosted website gives visitors to your site an unflattering impression of your company. Unless you just want to use free web hosting as a sort of training ground for evaluating different web hosting features, avoid using these hosts for your business. If you are building a site for personal use however, it is fine to use free web hosting if you want to save a little money on this cost.

The next consideration is shared versus dedicated web hosting. Shared hosting is just what it sounds like – your website will be sharing space on one of the web hosting companies’ services with many other websites.

For a business website, shared hosting may not be such a great idea. There are problems which can arise with shared web hosting.

If one of the other websites on the shared server is using too much of the system resources of the server, the performance of the other sites on the server – including yours – can be adversely affected. For businesses, dedicated hosting is usually a better idea.

Technical support is another incredibly important aspect of any web hosting plan. Your website will be better off with skilled technical support and responsive customer service backing it up. In the event of an outage, you want your site back up and running in the shortest possible time. Ask around to see what current customers have to say about the technical support offered by the web hosting company.

There are yet other things you should think about when looking for web hosting services, but in this article we have covered some of the top priorities. These can give you a good head start on finding a web hosting company which offers the service and features you need for your business.