The number of selection available for selecting a hosting supplier these days is staggering. You are presented with practically as many options for hosting plans than you get types of coffee at a Starbucks.
How do you know which are the good, the bad and the ugly?
For one, let's just level out exclude any type of Free hosting. If you are serious about running an Internet Business, an Ecommerce site or a enterprise Brochure website, then you should by all means; of course Not use a free hosting provider.
1) Free hosting is usually literally paid for by advertising. This means that you will be forced to have some form of advertising on your site.
2) Free hosting is not so trustworthy and you share your hosting space with thousands, if not millions of other websites. This is also true, to an extent, of shared hosting, but at least with shared hosting you have some type of assistance contract with your hosting provider.
3) You are just not projecting a expert image if you make use of free hosting. Hosting has become so affordable these days that there is no excuse any more for not having your own domain and your own hosting provider.
The next step up from free hosting is shared hosting. This is by far the most tasteless hosting model today. With shared hosting you also share space on a hosting server. This is where it becomes tricky to distinguish the melons from the real thing. The qoute is that the next step up from shared hosting is Virtual secret servers, or even dedicated servers. These are very costly especially for the mean website owner. Shared hosting is much more affordable for website owners that are venturing into the Internet world for the first time.
If you have a relatively large enterprise with a relatively large website and you do not have your own internal server infrastructure, you would by all means; of course steer away from shared hosting and rather go into partnership with a hosting assistance supplier where you can use dedicated servers or secret Virtual Servers. But we are talking here more of the requirements of the mean Joe Schmoe - the exiguous guy, like you or me, who wants to start his own exiguous Internet empire.
So, shared hosting is what it will be.
The advantages with shared hosting is that is cheap. Hosting is becoming economy and economy - in the United States at least. The qoute is that there are a lot of unscrupulous operators out there, who overload their servers. If you land up with one of them, you will by all means; of course find that Your website carrying out degrades due to the fact that some idiot sharing the same box is sending out 10000 emails to his newly bought list of scraped emails.
Take the following steps:
1. There are a lot of web hosting characterize sites. Visit these sites and see what customers are saying of the web hosting provider. But please note, do not take all things you see at face value. No hosting supplier is perfect, and all hosting providers Will get some bad reviews. The trick is to rule how well the qoute was handled and how well the hosting supplier recovered or did something about the problem. It is also worthwhile to visit hosting characterize sites where some type of rating is assigned to a host.
2. To narrow down your search considerably I am going to give you guidance based on my own prejudices - search for Cpanel Hosting on a Linux server. Don't mess around with other control panels or operating systems. Not everyone will agree with me and there are a lot of other control panels that are equally good, but you cannot go wrong with this composition and it narrows the field somewhat.
3. If you are on a possible hosting provider's website, take a look at the following details:
- Do they supply a corporeal address and phone number? Sure, all things can be done by email, but I was once in the situation where my withhold label for an emergency went unanswered and I decided to phone the enterprise - only to find out that they didn't publish their phone number.
- If they have so-called 'Live site support' available, how often is the withhold literally available? I've seen lots of sites claiming to have 'live support' but the life withhold seemed to be very dead every time that I visited the site.
- Send a pre-sales ask through their withhold label principles and make sure that you are happy with the way that the withhold desk is set up. You might spend some time here in time to come and you must be able to launch and withhold withhold tickets easily.
You also want to see how speedily the hosting supplier responds to your question. Don't get too excited however if they come back practically immediately. Pre-sales are usually much quicker off the mark than technical support! But it does give an indication.
See how long the enterprise has been in carrying out (some characterize sites supply this) - the longer the better!
- See if they allow adult hosting. If they do, be aware that adult hosting consumes a lot of resources and traffic. Your site might be negatively impacted by this if you land up on the same server.
4. Then you take a look at features.
The following features are essential:
- enough hard disk space. This is practically the least of your worries since ridiculous amounts of hard disk space are on offer these days. You can literally get 500 Mb of hard disk space for about per month and even more commonly, over 1Gb or 2Gb per month for about . You will probably not need this much space unless you are going to run a forum or membership site, or plan to host videos or podcasts. For a 'normal' site anything between 5Mb and 100Mb will be enough.
- enough bandwidth - this is also usually more than enough these days.
My guidance is, however, Not to go for the per month options. You are going to get what you pay for....
Other features that are leading are:
- Web statistics. I have found a very nice hosting enterprise only to find that they did not offer online statistics. Agreeing to them it degraded the carrying out of their servers. This may very well be, but you cannot control a website without statistics! Most hosting providers Do offer statistics, but it will never hurt to just make 100 sure.
- If you elected to go for Cpanel hosting as I am recommended, you will find that most other features that are necessary are available by default - quick premise of software such as shopping carts and blogs; subdomains; Ftp accounts; email inventory setup management; backups and more. all things that you would ever need, in fact.
Web Hosting companies - How To pick A Web Hosting supplier