Website Hosting Services – Selecting The Best One
If you want to create a web site or blog you will have to sign-up with one of the many website hosting services. This will give you space on a server, with a high speed internet connection, where you will be able to host your website.
In addition to a hosting service you will require a domain name. You may possibly be able to order a domain name via your website hosting service or they might even include one in the package (but you don’t have to avail yourself of this if you really want, for example, a .com or .org). Even though this is the easiest means to get started, it will almost certainly not be the cheapest. It is surprising how prices for domain names vary, even for the best extensions, so it is worthwhile looking at several domain registration sites. To link a domain name to your hosting account you just have to enter your hosting company’s nameservers on the domain name registration website.
You can access your hosting service by means of a control panel the capabilities of which will include setting up ftp accounts to get into your server and add files, creating as well as administering email addresses on your domain, managing databases, undertaking backups and displaying site statistics.
There are a great many businesses offering a website hosting service and it is not simple to pick the most appropriate service for you. You could imagine that hosting review web sites could help but unfortunately these are many and of varying quality. On the other hand it is worthwhile looking at independent sites like webhostingtalk.com or hostjury.com.
When choosing a web host your plan must be to locate a service that meets your needs at the lowest price. It would be a mistake to simply buy the least expensive service, then again there is no reason in going for an expensive service that offers more than you require. The key criteria to think about are:
Loading Time – Pages/posts should display quickly otherwise your site will provide a poor experience and first time users will not return.
Site Availability – Downtime is always unhealthy as users will not be able to get your website and may perhaps give up on you permanently. Your website hosting service should offer an guarantee of 99.9% uptime.
Support – Good technical support can give you the comfort of knowing that in the event of problems you can obtain assistance rapidly. A good website hosting service will offer support 24/7 by email and phone (in the best case toll free).
Hosting companies like to offer “unlimited” disk space and bandwidth (which is actually meaningless) nevertheless these resources ought to not be a problem for a new website. Most hosting accounts are “shared” which means that server and bandwidth are shared by many customers. This is all right for most users but if your website could turn out to be very busy in the future, ensure that there is an upgrade path to VPS (Virtual Private Server) hosting and then to Dedicated Server hosting.
