Friday, December 26, 2008

What To Look For In Web Hosting

By Gray Rollins

As you start a new website, you will have to look for an affordable web hosting company to give your new site a home on its servers and provide the other hardware and software needed to get your site live and online.

There are a lot of different web hosting companies out there, each of which offers a different array of packages and service options. Before you even begin looking for a web hosting company for your site, you need to sit down and carefully consider exactly what features you want your website to be able to offer.

Perhaps you'd like to have the capability for users to upload video or audio content, or you want to offer downloads of video or audio. You may want a message board, a hit counter or other features. Make a list of all of these features you want for your site - this will let you know what to look for in a web hosting company as you shop around.

There are even free web hosting options. While these are fine if you just want to build a small personal website, they are not ideal for businesses for a number of reasons - the disk space, bandwidth and features offered are typically limited and of course, using a free web host for your business' web site gives a bad impression to visitors.

You should also weigh shared web hosting versus dedicated hosting. Shared hosting is where your website shares space on a server at the hosting company with other websites.

For a business website, shared hosting may not be such a great idea. There are problems which can arise with shared web hosting.

For example, if one of the other sites uses too much bandwidth, this can slow down the performance of your site. It is far better to opt for dedicated web hosting for a business website.

You also need to think about the very important topic of technical support. Your website needs to have highly skilled and responsive support and service behind it. In case of any technical problems, you need to know that your site will be up and running again in short order. You should find out how the web hosting company you are considering performs in this department by talking to some of their current customers about their experiences with the customer service and technical support departments.

There are yet other things you should think about when looking for web hosting services, but in this article we have covered some of the top priorities. These can give you a good head start on finding a web hosting company which offers the service and features you need for your business.

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