Your business success today mostly depends on a vital web presence. While your website design and your search engine marketing strategies play a crucial role in promoting your services, the most important decision that you will make for your website is to choose a right web host. Web hosting incorporates a host of services and functions like the space where the website files are stored, the traffic to website, firewall protection, FTP access, email services, domain name registration, website building tools and lots more. Today, a host of companies are there in the market who offers web hosting services; thus, choosing the best from the lot sometime becomes difficult for most business owners. Here are a few tips that will help you find the right host for your website:
First Figure Out your Requirements: Many people create websites for non-business purposes, such as for displaying their home skills, family blogging, fan pages for the dogs etc. In such a case, a free web host will be fine to play around on. However, if it’s related to business or making money online, you should go for a good paid service where you will get a bunch of added benefits.
Reliability and Speed Access: Along with reliable and fast, the web host must guarantee its uptime too. While choosing the service, look for at least 99.5% uptime or higher. This is most important for corporate sites where a major part of the business depends on a flawless web presence. Travel, banking, food services, online recharge sites and so on should have a good uptime, because the unavailability of your website may lead your consumers to your competitor’s site.
Traffic/Bandwidth: Though many commercial web hosts advertise unlimited bandwidth, it's better not to believe on such advertisements. Bandwidths are not free and a host has to pay for it; thus, if you consume a lot of bandwidth, your host isn’t going to bear the cost silently for sure. It is always better to do a proper research on what’s the bandwidth limit that your service provider is offering you.
Disk Space: Website hosting companies often come out with unlimited disk space schemes. These are nothing but to tempt consumers to the services they offer. For most websites, a disk space of 1 GB
is sufficient. Thus, even if your website host tempts you with a 100 GB or more disk space, don’t let the 100 GB space be too big a factor in your consideration to choose a good server host. Technical Support: 24*7 technical support is one such aspect that most hosting service providers promise, but don’t keep when the need arises. Before considering such a service provider, check whether they have a technical team that works round the clock. Mail them at midnight, on Saturday nights and Sunday morning to check how much time they take to response to your query.
Feature Rich Service: Many hosting companies do not allow their clients to install PHP or Perl scripts without their approval. But it is important for you to have access because otherwise you need to wait for your service provider to implement a feature on your site. To customize your error pages or to protect your sites in various ways including preventing bandwidth theft and hotlinking, password-protect a directory etc, you should have access to create or modify “.htaccess” files. SSH access is useful to test certain scripts (programs), maintaining databases, etc. MySQL is needed if you want to run a blog or a content management system.
SSL Set Up: If you want to sell goods and services through your website, your first consideration should be to make your site secure, as for end consumers security is of paramount interest. An SSL set up gives your website more security. Though setting an SSL set up may require you to pay additional charges, it is most important if you have integrated a payment gateway to your website.
Email, Auto Responders, POP3 and Mail Forwarding: When you have your own site, it is natural for you to have e-mail addresses at your own domain name; this is important from the customer point of view as well. Before buying a hosting service do check whether the host allows you to set up e-mail addresses on your domain name, whether you can set an e-mail address to automatically reply to the sender with a present message and whether your host will give you access to retrieve your mail with your email software.
Control Panel: Though various hosts call this by different names, it essentially allows you to manage different aspects of your website by yourself. Always check that your control panel allows you to do things like add, delete and manage your e-mail addresses, and change passwords for your account. Selecting a good web hosting company is of paramount importance if you want to establish your online empire. Many people consider the price factor first while choosing a web hosting service provider, but it is always better to pay a little extra for a flawless service than to get a bad service for a little less; however, by this we never mean that the most expensive hosts are the best. Consider the service from different aspects and then select the best from the lot that better serves your requirements.
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