Tips On How To Choose A Web Hosting Service
Choosing a web hosting provider is an essential part of your overall strategy. Web hosting companies can differ radically in their pricing and service levels. You want to find a company that provides outstanding service - both in the technical and in the support arenas. If your web site takes a long time to load, or is unreliable, then your visitors will stop using it. Your web host must ensure that your web site is fast and reliable.
There are free web hosting providers, which might seem suitable to individuals wanting to set up a blog or personal website. Be very careful when choosing such a web host since they will often insert advertisements into your content. Their web servers are also often very slow because they want to host as many people as possible on each computer. This makes free web hosting completely unsuitable for business use - slow sites filled with adverts are not going to attract customers to your business! Also, because you're not paying for the service there is no real guarantee that the web server company will continue to provide it - you might find one day that your website has just been switched off.
Does your web host allow you to pay only for the services that you actually require or do they force you to buy "deluxe" packages that have more bells and whistles than your site will ever need? When you purchase a web hosting package you should consider what features you need and find a host that will provide that package. Disc space and bandwidth are probably the most basic requirements. Look at how big your website is to decide how much disc space you need on your web hosting package. Then consider how much traffic you expect to come to your site to decide how much bandwidth to purchase.
Once you've decided on the basics then look at some of the more complicated options. Does your webpage run on a scripted language like PHP or ASP? Does it require a database? Do you need spam protection? If your site runs on plain HTML or XHTML then you can probably safely choose a less complicated web hosting package. Don't purchase a hosting service until you're sure that it will support your site!