What are some of the things you should look for when choosing a web hosting? If you want to make your own personal website or company website the first step towards a good website is a good web hosting company. The first thing that one should decide before choosing a web hosting company is the features that one would require. Since web hosting is very important for creation of your web site, choosing right business hosting becomes crucial, especially if you encounter this issue for the first time. In order to make a right choice you should know the main criteria that will allow you to evaluate a web hosting that suits your purposes. Before researching hosting companies, it is important to recognize what your individual sites needs are.
The very first thing you have to remember is that you should not jump to early conclusions. Make sure that you have made an assessment of available information by means of visiting web sites of at least several hosting companies. While price is always a factor, you should realize that you often get what you pay for, although it’s not necessarily true that the most expensive hosts are the best. Before paying money you should realize what you are paying for.
We would suggest you considering factors by which all hosting companies can be measured.
1.Services
# You should firstly define disk space ( bandwidth ) that you will require. Once you have defined how much web space ( megabytes) your web site will occupy, choose appropriate hosting and If you envisage that you will expand your site eventually, you might want to cater for future expansion.
# Then you should decide which technological facilities your web hosting will provide you with. The new standards of the website hosting business presume fully functional services, support of such scripting languages as PHP, Perl, Java. CGI. Telnet or SSH access is useful for certain things, including testing CGI scripts, maintaining databases, etc. Cron jobs may be needed for programs that you need to be run periodically (eg. once a day).Also it is important to being able to easily control and manage your web hosting account via a control panel.
# If you are planning on doing any sort of business through your website, you might want to look out to see if the host provides SSL (secure server), MySQL, Shopping Cart facilities. These facilities normally involve a higher priced package or additional charges. The main thing is to check to see if they are available at all before you commit to the host. You will definitely need SSL if you plan to collect credit card information on your site.
# Data transfer (sometimes loosely referred to as “traffic” or “bandwidth”) is the amount of bytes transferred from your site to visitors when they browse your site. Don’t believe any commercial web host that advertises “unlimited bandwidth”. The host has to pay for the bandwidth, and if you consume a lot of it, they will not silently bear your costs. Many high bandwidth websites have found this out the hard way when they suddenly receive an exhorbitant bill for having “exceeded” the “unlimited bandwidth”. Always look for details on how much traffic the package allows.
# Control panel is called various names by different hosts, but essentially, they all allow you to manage different aspects of your web account yourself. Typically, and at the very minimum, it should allow you to do things like add, delete, and manage your email addresses, and change passwords for your account. I would not go for a host where I have to go through their technical support each time I want to change a password or add/delete an email account. Such chores are common maintenance chores that every webmaster performs time and time again, and it would be a great hassle if you had to wait for their technical support to make the changes for you.
The most well known control panels are cPanel and Direct Admin.
2.Cost of Services
Be wary of the universal truth in this life is that you get what you pay for! That being said, understanding what the purpose of your website often defines how much you should pay for a website. Make sure there are no hidden extras in your hosting package.
3.Quality of Services
Of course, you can make full assessment of quality of your hosting provider only after you have been using the services for some time. However there some aspects that should be evaluated before you have eventually chosen a hosting provider.
Web site of your provide to include all relevant information such as contact details ( address, email, phone numbers, etc. ) and detailed description of features they are providing.
Service is also very important for a web hosting company, it’s mean you should have access to your host’s support team not only via e-mail or live chat but also by telephone anytime. Does its technical support function 24 hours a day, 7 days a week (often abbreviated 24/7), all year around? Note that I will not accept a host which does not have staff working on weekends or public holidays. You will be surprised at how often things go wrong at the most inconvenient of times. Incidentally, just because a host advertises that it has 24/7 support does not necessarily mean that it really has that kind of support. Test them out by emailing at midnight and on Saturday nights, Sunday mornings, etc. Check out how long they take to respond. Besides speed of responses, check to see if they are technically competent. You wouldn’t want to sign up for a host that is run by a bunch of salesmen who only know how to sell and not fix problems.
You should also know whether your hosting package provides you with a free trial period. Usually this period is limited by 1 or 2 weeks. If you are not satisfied with the quality services you can get your money back.
All the above will help you to evaluate a hosting company you are going to deal with. It is up to you to decide whether this company meets your needs.
