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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