Hosting plan choice is a major step when you choose to start up a website. Prior posts from me were about domain name choice and website creation. Now let’s talk a little about hosting: One of the critical decisions you will have to make is what type of hosting plan to use and what hosting provider to choose.
Once your website has been created, it is time to make it go live on the internet. In order to do so, you will need a hosting plan. A hosting plan is different from a domain name. You own your domain name but you rent a hosting plan. To make your website live on the internet you will be paying a service provider to publish it for you. That’s what a hosting plan is. This article covers what to look for in a hosting plan.
SERVICE The number one thing to look for in a hosting plan is service. Bells and whistles and fancy features will do you no good if you can’t get customer service in a timely fashion. Once your website is live on the internet you will want it to be up all the time. Strategically the best thing you can do for your website upfront is to choose a hosting company that is reliable in terms of customer service as well as “uptime”.
UPTIME Does the hosting provider you are considering offer an “uptime guarantee? The better hosting providers will offer up to 99% uptime. Even at 99% average uptime it can mean that your website will be off the internet for over 7 hours per month. If at all possible, choose a host guaranteeing up to 99.9% uptime.
SIZE How large will the website be? One of the determining factors for the price of most hosting plans is the amount of space required to store the website on their server’s hard drive. Most websites do not require much space but if you’re planning on having a large site with a lot of multimedia content or an ecommerce site selling multiple items, you’ll probably need additional disk space on your hosting plan.
LINUX OR WINDOWS This question refers to the operating systems available for hosting and which one to choose. This question has no relevance to the brand of operating system you are using on your computer. What programming language was used in the Web site design? For example, if you designed a website using ASP or ASP.NET, you’ll need to find a Windows hosting plan. If you have a Web site that uses CGI or PHP, you’ll need to get a Linux hosting plan. Note that if you are simply publishing a basic html website, the choice of hosting Operating system won’t really matter as much until you get into more advanced languages such as PHP or ASP.
TRAFFIC How much traffic or how many visitors do you expect monthly? Hosting plans are usually sold at different level plans according to the bandwith that will be required. Bandwidth = Traffic. Obviously more bandwidth is better because it allows more visitors to visit your site, but at the beginning this will be hard for you to gauge. The best advice here is to start off with a low cost, low bandwidth plan and upgrade it later as the traffic to your website grows.
SHARED OR DEDICATED HOSTING Whether or not to choose shared hosting over dedicated hosting comes down to the following: First a brief description of shared hosting, which is sharing space on a server with dozens or perhaps hundreds of other websites. The main factor here is that you will have no control over the operating system, database structure, etc., and will have to work within the structure setup by the hosting provider. Using dedicated (or virtual dedicated) hosting means that you have full control over the server your website is stored on and that only your data occupies the space on that server. In other words, you would determine what operating system to use, what type database management software, what type of blog software, what type shopping cart, etc., etc. Generally customer support will be low to non-existent, since this type of hosting is geared to the advanced user who will be using his own custom setup. The bottom line: start off with shared hosting if you are a beginner, until you are advanced enough to progress to your own controlled dedicated hosting environment.
At StartYourWebsiteToday.com I offer 99.9% guaranteed uptime and offer customer service 24/7. The hosting plans that are offered include a variety: shared hosting, virtual dedicated hosting, and dedicated hosting plans with either Linux or Windows operating systems for every need and budget ranging from the small personal website to large online multimedia sites to those interested in ecommerce website building. To see what is available, click HERE: Hosting plans.