Choosing the Right Hosting Plan for Your Website
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: Choosing a hosting plan is a primary step in launching your fledgling web presence.
The next step after creating your website is to make it live on the internet, or publish it. Publishing to the internet involves getting a hosting plan. By purchasing a domain name you have branded, or named your website. You own the name, but now you must pay rent to someone to actually get your website online. To make your website live on the internet you will be paying a service provider to publish it for you. That’s what a hosting plan is. The key considerations for choosing a good hosting plan will be discussed here.
SERVICE The number one thing to look for in a hosting plan is service. Bells and whistles and fancy features will do you no good if you can’t get customer service in a timely fashion. If your website is not available on the internet you are losing opportunities to connect with customers. 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 Does the hosting provider you are considering offer an “uptime guarantee? The better hosting providers will offer up to 99% uptime. 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 How large will the website be? 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. The determining factor here is what programming language was used to design the website. For example, if CGI or PHP programming language was used, the best choice for the hosting operating system would be Linux. For a website designed with ASP, the best choice would be Windows. For the novice user who is building a simple html website the above may not be a consideration at first, but may become important later on as you become more experienced and add more features to your website.
TRAFFIC Will you be expecting lots of visitors to your website? Hosting plans are usually sold at different level plans according to the bandwith that will be required. Bandwidth = Traffic. The more visitors or traffic you expect on your site, the higher the bandwidth you will need, and the more the plan will cost. The best advice here is to start off with a low cost, low bandwidth plan and upgrade it later as the traffic to your website grows.
SHARED OR DEDICATED HOSTING Whether or not to choose shared hosting over dedicated hosting comes down to the following: A shared hosting plan is exactly as it sounds, and means that your website will be stored on a server along with lots of other websites. In this hosting format you generally have no ability to make changes to the resident software on the system, meaning you cannot change or upgrade the operating system, or the database management system, etc. You will have to work within the software structure provided by the hosting company. Using dedicated (or virtual dedicated) hosting means that you have full control over the server your website is stored on and that only your data occupies the space on that server. 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. This type of hosting is definitely geared to the more advanced user, and usually you won’t be able to get as much customer support because it will be a custom setup. The best advice I can give to the newbie is to use shared hosting at first, until you gain more experience and abilities and are ready to take the plunge into something as advanced as dedicated hosting.
At StartYourWebsiteToday.com I offer 99.9% guaranteed uptime and offer customer service 24/7. 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.
