Saturday, January 3, 2009

What To Look For In Web Hosting

By Gray Rollins

As you start a new website, you will have to look for an affordable web hosting company to give your new site a home on its servers and provide the other hardware and software needed to get your site live and 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 even free web hosting options. While these are fine if you just want to build a small personal website, they are not ideal for businesses for a number of reasons - the disk space, bandwidth and features offered are typically limited and of course, using a free web host for your business' web site gives a bad impression to visitors.

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.

This is also not really ideal for a business website; you can run into difficulties due to the actions of other websites hosted on the same server.

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.

One of the most important things to think about here is the level of technical support and customer service offered. Your website will only be as strong as the capabilities of the support staff behind it. Look into the reputation of the company in regards to these factors - if possible, speak with some current customers to see what they think of the support and service offered by the 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. - 15790

About the Author: