Hosting Plans- What to Look For Before Deciding
Selecting a hosting plan is a critical step when you want to start up a website. In prior posts I discussed choosing a domain name and creation of web pages. Next we will discuss hosting: Early on in your decision making process, you will want to shop for a hosting plan.
The next step after creating your website is to make it live on the internet, or publish it. 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. In it’s simplest terms a hosting plan is paying a company to broadcast your website onto the internet. Let’s go over some of the key important factors to consider when choosing a hosting plan:
SERVICE The number one thing to look for in a hosting plan is service. It does not matter that a multitude of features are offered or if the price is low if the service you will be getting with your hosting plan is sub par or even worse, nonexistent. Once your website is live on the internet you will want it to be up all the time. For that reason you want to be sure and choose a hosting provider that will provide the best uptime as well the best availability and quality of customer service.
UPTIME What is the hosting company’s “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! If at all possible, choose a host guaranteeing up to 99.9% uptime.
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. If your website will be media rich with videos or music or photo files, or a large e-commerce site with a lot of catalogue pages, you will have to take space into consideration as a criteria for choosing the right hosting plan.
LINUX OR WINDOWS This question refers to the operating systems available for hosting and which one to choose. BTW it does not matter what operating system you are using on your personal 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. 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 The question of shared vs. dedicated hosting is really answered in a very simple way: 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. Dedicated or virtual dedicated hosting is different in the sense that you will have full control over the environment that your website resides in, and you will have the only access to that space. Dedicated server hosting gives you full control over setup of the operating system and auxilliary programs such as database management or shopping cart or database management software. 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 StartMyWebsiteToday.com our uptime guarantee is 99.9% and we offer 24/7 customer service. 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.