How to Choose a Hosting Company
There are thousands of web hosting companies offering quality hosting services. It is hard to look through all of them and choose the right one, especially if you are just a beginner in web hosting. If you want to get your site up and running on the internet, you have to determine your needs first. Here are some tips on choosing hosting features which are common for all the hosting plans.
Disk Space is the amount of space available for storing your website on the hosting web server. Hosting plans offer different amount of disk space. If you own a small website, you won't need a lot of disk space, but if you have a big database driven site, you will need more disk space.
Bandwidth is a measure of how much website traffic is available to your website. It describes how much data can be passed from the web server that hosts your site to the browser of the person who is using your site. Large directories, like Google, take up a lot of bandwidth. If you need to find hosting for a small business website, you will not need very high bandwidth - 2 GB a month will be plenty. If you are planning to make large amounts of video, music and other files available for download to the website users, you will be using much more bandwidth.
Server Type describes the software installed on the server. The common server software is Windows, UNIX and Linux. Windows hosting is slightly more expensive than Linux and UNIX. If you want to run applications developed by Microsoft - like a Microsoft SQL server database, Microsoft Active Server pages, then Windows hosting will be the right choice. If you just need to host a basic website, the server type is not crucial.
Email Accounts is number of email accounts on the hosting server. They will have your website name extension, e.g. info@yoursite.com. You are not going to need more than 10 email accounts for a small business website.
Support is the hosting company assistance available to its clients. Phone support and 24/7 hour live chat support are the best types of customer service; they are going to cost more as well. Therefore if you have a basic website, email support will work for you just fine.
Free Hosting is provided by some companies that are not very reliable. You should avoid hosts providing free hosting. You will receive quality services and plenty of features only with paid hosting companies.
After you have determined your needs, you will have to compare plans offered by various hosting companies. Except for looking at their prices, you should also pay attention to additional hosting features like databases, server side scripting, etc. It is also helpful to read user reviews and comments on different hosting companies. Create a comparison table with all of the features that you would like to have and then enter the information about every company to help you understand which one meets your needs.
