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Finding the Right Web Hosting Service
If you want your website to be successful and to be around for the long term, you need to know how to find the right web hosting service. While you can change to a different web hosting service somewhere down the line, it is important that you get everything right from the start, in order to avoid the hassle and the loss of readership you will incur if you just migrate later. Here are a few things you need to do in order to find the right web hosting service:
Decide on What You Want Out of Your Website
This should come first, as it will be the deciding factor on whether you can go with a free web host or must invest in a paid hosting provider. To wit, if you just plan on having a website for your friends and family members, you can make do with a free web host. But if you have plans of attracting massive traffic and monetizing your website, you really need to invest in a paid hosting plan, as free hosts cannot accommodate your needs (and sometimes will actively prevent you from any attempt to earn a profit).
Be Wary of Promises
When looking at the promises of web hosts, it is important to have proper understanding of what web hosts are really capable of and whether the one you are looking at can really deliver. For instance, it has become common for web hosts to offer unlimited bandwidth and unlimited storage, but are they really unlimited or are there subtle provisions that will limit your usage? For example, an unlimited storage isn’t so unlimited if they limit the filesize of the files you can upload, or if they only allow certain “safe” filetypes like html, txt, jpg, and gif.
Don’t Be Blinded by the Price
With the economy these days, it’s understandable if people are always looking for cheap alternative options, but web hosting is one of the things where you may want to dial down the budget-mindset, because you really do get what you pay for. Sometimes, cheap hosting will give you a limited amount of features and capability, if not poor service. This doesn’t mean you have to automatically go for the most expensive ones. Just be sensible about it and always remember that if something seems too good to be true, it probably is.
Uptime is Important
You should check out the uptime guarantee of the host. A downtime, whether it’s for regular maintenance or because of a crash, means that your website is unavailable to users and search engine spiders. Frequent downtimes will result in loss of rankings (as search engines assume that your site is not reliable) and loss of visitors. However, there’s no such thing as 100% uptime as even the best web hosting companies need to take down their servers from time to time due to regular maintenance, patching, and upgrades. The industry standard is 99.9% (roughly 8 hours of total downtime per year), so try to go for sites that meet or come close to that and avoid hosts that promise more.
Last But Not the Least, Check Out Their Customer Support
Remember that everytime there is a problem, you’re going to have to deal with their customer support. So make sure the web host’s support service can be easily contacted and are capable of helping you.
Tags: web hosting tips
