Website Hosting - Five Factors To Assess For Choosing Hosting For Your Site

By Keisha Bredeweg


When you're constructing a company website, it is vital that you pick the right website hosting. Even though your website is an expression of just how good your products and services are, its quality will not be showcased properly if its host is not performing up to par. You will not be able to penetrate your intended market, not to mention convince them to purchase your products, if your host fails to render your site properly, experiences frequent downtime, or spams your pages with annoying banner ads. Thus, you should never take for granted the task of selecting a good hosting service for your site.

But how do you go about with selecting website hosting? There are many factors that come into play with regards to picking the right host for your site. However, the most important of these factors are bandwidth, disk space, uptime, customer support, and pricing.

The performance of your website is hugely affected by how much bandwidth your website hosting has allowed you to use. When we say "bandwidth," we talk about how much information gets moved from your website to whichever computer opens your site. Your site will initially require around 3GB of bandwidth or so. However, you are more likely to require more bandwidth as your website gets more traffic. It is important that you know your bandwidth allocation and the additional costs you'd shoulder upon exceeding that allowance. Stay away from any proposals involving unlimited bandwidth. There is no such thing as free lunch, even with hosting services.

When you search for website hosting, you may be tempted by proposals that include 100GB of disk space for your website. Unlimited disk space proposals are common as well. Still, you should bear in mind that a typical blog or newsletter-type website will never consume more than 20MB of space. The only time you'll find it necessary to have gigabytes' worth of space is if you intend to upload video and audio on your site.

When it comes to website hosting, you must also take a look at the host's uptime. The uptime your host guarantees should never be under 99.9%. Can you reasonably expect your targeted audience to go to your site if they can't even load your pages? How much downtime your website gets is a huge deal, and a 99.9% uptime still equates with downtime of eight hours annually. If your host needs to go down, it should let you know immediately. Moreover, it should compensate you for the bother in an effort to keep you happy.

Your chosen website hosting should also have extensive support documentation and multiple channels of customer support for whenever you need help regarding your website. You will never know when you'd have an issue with your website, so it's important that you have can access this help you need 24/7. You should be able to contact the host's customer support via live chat, telephone or email without any hassles.

Last, but not the least, your website hosting has to offer a reasonable price package. With business websites, free hosting is entirely out of the question. For less than $10 a month, it's entirely possible for you to enjoy excellent regular hosting. But you must be certain that you're receiving what you paid for when you subscribe to the host's service.

Choosing hosting for your business website can be tricky. But as long as you carefully look at the factors that matters the most to your site, you can always get a good website hosting service.




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