Selecting a web hosting company is like sending one of your
children off to college. You may have complete confidence in
your son or daughter's abilities but unless they are placed in
the proper environment they will not have the opportunity to
thrive. Likewise, no matter how sophisticated or impressive the
website you have designed may be, if you do not place the site
where it can perform optimally you will likely be disappointed
in the results.
Selecting web hosting is not simply finding a place where your
website can reside. It is finding the company that offers the
resources that will allow your website to operate effectively
and to grow as the business or public demands. This means that
you must be able to store and transfer enough data so that your
site functions smoothly but also remains affordable.
Free web hosting services normally require that you allow ads to
be placed on your site. These generate revenue for the hosting
company by enabling them to display ads to visitors to your
website. Only you can determine if the ads are appropriate for
visitors to your site. In addition you will have to decide if
the amount of storage and the available bandwidth will be
sufficient for the type of website that you want to display. A
free service may be completely appropriate for a personal
website that is periodically modified. But trying to operate a
site with significant traffic or a commercial focus may be
"penny wise and pound foolish."
All commercial web hosting companies are not created equal. Of
course, cost is an issue but reliability and service will likely
be major factors in the decision making process. You should
expect your host to be up and functioning 100% of the time but
you will likely only see guarantees of 99-99.5% uptime. Less
than this is unacceptable.
If you will personally be managing much of the activity for your
site, make sure that you are comfortable with the Control Panel.
Some hosts present Control Panels that are cumbersome and
complicated. You want to easily navigate through routine
functions. You will also want to make sure that the hosting
company has functionality that you may not be using now but will
likely use in the future. These would include PHP, MySQL, SSI,
.htaccess, SSL, etc. Examine the offers for email and
autoresponders also.
Many web hosting services offer very low rates if you commit to
a year or more of hosting. While this may turn out to be an
excellent value in the long term, it may be advisable to pay
each month until you are confident in the service and, quite
importantly, the quality of the technical support that they
provide. Getting accurate responses to questions quickly will
make your life as a webmaster less stressful.
