Choosing a Hosting Company

Now that you have purchased a domain name and designed your website you will need a web hosting service so that people can visit your website on the internet. There are three ways to set up your site on the Internet. Firstly there are companies that provide free hosting accounts. However there are many drawbacks to this. Usually they will show advertisements on your site which doesn’t give the image of a professional business. In addition you will likely be very limited on hard drive space, bandwidth, email accounts, and features such as cgi scripts or FrontPage extensions.

The second option is for you to buy and install your own server. This can be both expensive and difficult. You would need a dedicated IP address and a fast internet connection either in your own premises or at your business location. You could use an ADSL line but this is not a robust solution. You would also need the technical skills to install the necessary hosting software, configure it, maintain it and repair it whenever there are any technical problems.

The most common option is to purchase a virtual web hosting package from a professional website hosting company. This is the option recommended for most small business needs. Here are a few things to take into consideration when choosing your website hosting company:

Reliability – This is extremely important because site that is frequently down will lose a lot of visitors. Choose a website with a high rate of uptime.

Speed of Access – A slow website is just as bad as an unreliable one. Your visitors might get impatient and leave if your website takes too long to load.

Data Transfer (Traffic/Bandwidth) – Data transfer is the amount of bytes transferred from your site to visitors when they browse your site. It is recommended to avoid website hosts that advertise “unlimited bandwidth” because going by experience there are always other limits in place. Most small business sites use less than 3GB of bandwidth per month when just starting out. Check with the host to see what will happen when your requirements increase over time.

Disk space – For the same reason as bandwidth, watch out for those offering “unlimited disk space”. Most sites don’t need huge around of disk space and oftentimes 10MB is more than sufficient per site.

Technical support – Enquire into support services offered by the hosting company. Are they open 24/7 and on holidays? Usually when problems happen it’s always at the worst possible time! Do they have good help resources if you need assistance in using the features they offer? Make sure their staff are technically competent to resolve any problems.

Multiple Domain Hosting and Subdomains – Some companies allow you to host more than one website per account and multiple subdomains such as blog.mysite.com, shop.mysite.com or foru.mysite.com. If you plan on having more than one website this is a feature you should defiantly look for.

Server – Most website hosting companies offer both Windows and Linux hosting. Linux is the most popular choice for small business websites, unless your website requires a specific Windows only technology such as ASP, MS-SQL, Access, Share-point, or .NET. Linux hosting offers a wide range of features and is typically less expensive than Windows hosting.

Price – Of course price is always important, but be prepared to pay a reasonable about for a good website host. Beware of deals that are very cheap, these deals are often more suitable for personal websites that don’t require the reliability and features that professional business websites do.

Email, Autoresponders, POP3, IMAP, Mail Forwarding – How many email accounts are included? Is there an option to set up an auto response? Can you pick up email though Outlook or other email software or use a webmail interface? It is important to be able to use your own domain name for email such as info@mydomain.com. It is not professional to use a Yahoo, Hotmail, or other free email address.

Other features – Most website hosts offer a range of additional features such as, FTP, telnet, SSH, crontabs, and SSL. Be sure to check which ones you will need for your website to work properly.