Website Hosting Nightmares
I have a friend who decided to host her website with the cheapest hosting should could find. She thought she was doing herself a favor and saving a lot of money.
She ended up having lots of problems with the particular host. If her site was down, she had to try to contact them and they were completely unreachable. She was on the phone a lot and sent in endless support tickets. Sure, it was discount web hosting but what she went through with them was not worth it. In the end, she said she would have gladly paid 5 times what she was paying if their service was actually reliable and if they were easy to get a hold of.
Some features you want to look for when selecting a web host are:
- Uptime. Do they have an uptime guarantee? If they do go down, what happens?
- Do they support the web technology that you are going to use?
- Databases / MySQL
- PHP
- ASP
- Perl / CGI
- Ruby on Rails
- Python
- How many email accounts do you get?
- How much space do you get? Is it unlimited space? If you do go over on space, what happens?
- How much bandwidth do you get? Is it unlimited bandwidth? If you do go over on traffic, what happens?
Unlimited bandwidth is a very important feature for website hosting. Some web hosts will charge you somewhere in the neighborhood of $5 or $10 per month for 1 GB of extra bandwidth. So if your website happens to be popular, you’ll end up paying more. Or if your site would somehow get compromised and used to distribute movies or something, you could end up with a surprisingly large website hosting bill when it’s not even your fault. To insure that you don’t get socked with a huge website hosting bill, it’s best to find a website host that offers unlimited bandwidth website hosting.
You should also decide if you’ll host on a Linux/Unix web server or a Windows server. I prefer Linux /Unix / FreeBSD servers. They are by far much more reliable, more secure and they run very fast. There are also a lot more web hosting utilities and stats programs written for Linux servers. You’ll really be doing yourself a favor by selecting Linux hosting.
Researching and planning your website hosting can help you avoid a website hosting nightmare. Think about space, bandwidth, hosting platform (operating system), backups and uptime. It’s also good to read some reviews on web hosts and see what others have to say. Sometimes the cheapest isn’t the best but there are some really good deals to be had on website hosting since there’s plenty of competition now. Good luck!
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