Provide A Good Home For Your Website.
By: | Posted: 04th January 2007
Provide A Good Home For Your Website.
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.
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Tags: bandwidth, traffic, free web hosting services, web hosting company, web hosting services, web hosting companies, guarantees, reliability, hosts, control panel, storage, commercial web, personal website, decision making process, confidence, proper environment