Hosting Plans- What to Look For Before Deciding

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Hosting Plans- What to Look For Before Deciding

Posted on 04. Jul, 2009 by admin in Web Hosting

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: Choosing a hosting plan is a primary step in launching your fledgling web presence.

The next step after creating your website is to make it live on the internet, or publish it. Publishing to the internet involves getting a hosting plan. By purchasing a domain name you have branded, or named your website. You own the name, but now you must pay rent to someone to actually get your website online. In it’s simplest terms a hosting plan is paying a company to broadcast your website onto the internet. 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. No consideration, including price, should supersede Good Customer Service as the criteria for choosing your hosting provider. If your website is not available on the internet you are losing opportunities to connect with customers. 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? Many guarantee 99% uptime for their servers. That sounds great, but it does mean that your site could go down for 1% of the time, which means over 7 hours out of each month! The best hosting providers will have a track record of up to 99.9% uptime, which essentially guarantees you that downtime is negligible or even non-existent.

SIZE What size, or how many pages will the website have? The amount of disk space all of your website's pages takes up will determine the size of the hosting plan you will need. 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 Which operating system should your hosting plan use? BTW it does not matter what operating system you are using on your personal computer. The determining factor here is what programming language was used to design the website. For example, if CGI or PHP programming language was used, the best choice for the hosting operating system would be Linux. For a website designed with ASP, the best choice would be Windows. For the novice user who is building a simple html website the above may not be a consideration at first, but may become important later on as you become more experienced and add more features to your website.

TRAFFIC Will you be expecting lots of visitors to your website? Hosting plans are usually sold at different level plans according to the bandwith that will be required. Bandwidth = Traffic. The more visitors or traffic you expect on your site, the higher the bandwidth you will need, and the more the plan will cost. Usually the best way to proceed here is to start with a basic low bandwidth plan, and upgrade later as the traffic begins to flow to the website.

SHARED OR DEDICATED HOSTING Whether or not to choose shared hosting over dedicated hosting comes down to the following: A shared hosting plan is exactly as it sounds, and means that your website will be stored on a server along with lots of other websites. In this hosting format you generally have no ability to make changes to the resident software on the system, meaning you cannot change or upgrade the operating system, or the database management system, etc. You will have to work within the software structure provided by the hosting company. 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. This type of hosting is definitely geared to the more advanced user, and usually you won't be able to get as much customer support because it will be a custom setup. The best advice I can give to the newbie is to use shared hosting at first, until you gain more experience and abilities and are ready to take the plunge into something as advanced as dedicated hosting.

At StartYourWebsiteToday.com our uptime guarantee is 99.9% and we offer 24/7 customer service. We also have a selection of shared, dedicated, and virtual dedicated hosting plans to suit all budgets and sizes and types of websites. To review the options we offer, click HERE: Hosting plans.

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