Don’t Buy Website Hosting Until You Read this Article
Excellent technical support is the number one thing you should look at when you compare hosting companies. You’re a busy person and want to get your problems solved as quickly as possible. You want a web hosting company that respects your time and helps you solve your problems quickly. Support should be available 24-hours by phone, chat, an online “knowledge base”, and email or ticket system. Depending on your type of problem and time frame, you may need each of these different services.
Uptime is another factor to review in a web hosting company. When you have put hard work into planning and having your site created, you want to know others can view it. You should look for it to be functional for at least 99% of the time. Most hosting companies offer an uptime guarantee. Beware that a guarantee only means that if they don’t meet their uptime standard, you are given your monthly fee back on a prorated basis. They don’t usually compensate you for lost traffic or sales.
Other important factors to look at when choosing a hosting company are number of sites you may host, bandwidth and disk space. The best hosting companies are now offering “unlimited” for all of these items. The number of sites or domains you may host used to be just one per account, in the old days. Now you may host an unlimited number of sites with most hosting companies. Fun, fun, fun. The second factor, bandwidth, is the amount of traffic between your site and the internet. Say your site was mentioned on an important newscast and a ton of traffic was sent to you. You would need a lot of bandwidth in that situation. The final factor is disk space and is now usually unlimited at most hosting companies. Disk space is the amount of memory used by all of your files, photos and videos. Note that although hosting companies claim to offer you “unlimited” amounts, if you are going to need a sudden large increase in any of these factors, you should contact your hosting company beforehand. They may be able to charge you in that situation.
Free hosting. Is is worth it? There are some free hosting companies that make you put advertising on your site in exchange for not paying. There are others that don’t require advertising, but that business model doesn’t work for very long. And how are they paying for great support people? My advice is to find a company with great services and technical support at a decent, but fair price. When you are pulling your hair out over a problem with your site and are able to reach a technical support person by phone at 2 a.m. and they give you just the right answer, it will be worth that small monthly fee.
Being the owner or webmaster of your own site is a joy. You may keep it for years and years. Therefore, be certain to pick a hosting company that will have all the services and support that you need.
Learn more about web hosting. Stop by Bethany Payne’s site where you can get great web hosting reviews and her top 2 recommendations.
Popularity: unranked [?]
