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Choosing the Right Hosting Plan for Your Website
By racer48 | August 11, 2009
So you think you want to start up a website. Prior posts from me were about domain name choice and website creation. Next we will discuss hosting: One of the critical decisions you will have to make is what type of hosting plan to use and what hosting provider to choose.
Once your website has been created, it is time to make it go live on the internet. To have your website seen on the internet you will need to choose a hosting plan. By purchasing a domain name you have branded, or named your website. You own the name, but now you must pay rent to someone to actually get your website online. With a hosting plan you will be paying a service provider to publish your website on the internet for all to see. Let’s go over some of the key important factors to consider when choosing a hosting plan:
SERVICE The number one thing to look for in a hosting plan is service. It does not matter that a multitude of features are offered or if the price is low if the service you will be getting with your hosting plan is sub par or even worse, nonexistent. After you have published, or “gone live” on the internet, the last thing you want is for the website to go down and become unavailable to potential customers. Strategically the best thing you can do for your website upfront is to choose a hosting company that is reliable in terms of customer service as well as “uptime”.
UPTIME Does the hosting provider you are considering offer an “uptime guarantee? The better hosting providers will offer up to 99% uptime. That sounds great, but it does mean that your site could go down for 1% of the time, which means over 7 hours out of each month! If at all possible, choose a host guaranteeing up to 99.9% uptime.
SIZE How large is your site? Most hosting providers set the pricing on their hosting plans according to the space taken up on their servers by the website. If your website will be media rich with videos or music or photo files, or a large e-commerce site with a lot of catalogue pages, you will have to take space into consideration as a criteria for choosing the right hosting plan.
LINUX OR WINDOWS Which operating system should your hosting plan use? This question has no relevance to the brand of operating system you are using on your computer. The determining factor here is what programming language was used to design the website. For example, if CGI or PHP programming language was used, the best choice for the hosting operating system would be Linux. For a website designed with ASP, the best choice would be Windows. Note that if you are simply publishing a basic html website, the choice of hosting Operating system won’t really matter as much until you get into more advanced languages such as PHP or ASP.
TRAFFIC How much traffic or how many visitors do you expect monthly? Hosting plans are usually sold at different level plans according to the bandwith that will be required. Bandwidth = Traffic. Obviously more bandwidth is better because it allows more visitors to visit your site, but at the beginning this will be hard for you to gauge. The best advice here is to start off with a low cost, low bandwidth plan and upgrade it later as the traffic to your website grows.
SHARED OR DEDICATED HOSTING Whether or not to choose shared hosting over dedicated hosting comes down to the following: First a brief description of shared hosting, which is sharing space on a server with dozens or perhaps hundreds of other websites. The main factor here is that you will have no control over the operating system, database structure, etc., and will have to work within the structure setup by the hosting provider. Dedicated or virtual dedicated hosting is different in the sense that you will have full control over the environment that your website resides in, and you will have the only access to that space. Dedicated server hosting gives you full control over setup of the operating system and auxilliary programs such as database management or shopping cart or database management software. This type of hosting is definitely geared to the more advanced user, and usually you won’t be able to get as much customer support because it will be a custom setup. The bottom line: start off with shared hosting if you are a beginner, until you are advanced enough to progress to your own controlled dedicated hosting environment.
At StartYourWebsiteToday.com I offer 99.9% guaranteed uptime and offer customer service 24/7. We also have a selection of shared, dedicated, and virtual dedicated hosting plans to suit all budgets and sizes and types of websites. To see what is available, click HERE: Hosting plans.
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