Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Key Factors in Selecting the Right Hosting Plan

Hosting plan choices is a big step when you decide to start a website. Ex-post from me was about domain name selection and website creation. Next we will discuss hosting: Early in your decision, you will want to shop for a hosting plan. 

Once your website has been created, it is time to make it go live on the Internet. To get your website seen on the Internet, choose a hosting plan. A hosting plan is different from a domain name. You own your domain name but you rent a hosting plan. To make your website live on the Internet, you must pay a service provider to publish it for you. This is what a hosting plan. Let's go over some of the key important factors to consider when choosing a hosting plan: 

SERVICE First and foremost in your decision is to consider the reputation of the provider's services. No considerations, including price, should replace good customer service as criteria for choosing your provider. Once you've published, or "gone live" on the Internet, the last thing you want is for the website to crash and become inaccessible to potential customers. Strategically the best thing you can do for your site in advance to choose a hosting company that is reliable in terms of customer service and "uptime". 

Uptime When shopping for a hosting company, find out if they have an uptime guarantee. Many guarantee 99% uptime for their servers. It sounds good, but it means that your site can go down to 1% of the time, which means more than seven hours out of every month! If at all possible, choose a host guaranteeing up to 99.9% uptime. 

SIZE How big will the site be? One of the decisive factors for the price of most hosting plans is the amount of space required to store the website on their server's hard drive. Most websites do not require much space, but if you plan to have a large site with lots of multimedia content or an ecommerce site that sells several products, you will probably need additional disk space on your hosting plan. 

Linux or Windows This question refers to the operating systems available for hosting and what you should choose. This question is not relevant to the brand of operating system you use on your computer. What programming languages were used on the site design? For example, if you've designed a website with ASP or ASP.NET, you must find a Windows hosting plan. If you have a site that uses CGI or PHP, you get a Linux hosting plan. For novice user who is building a simple html website above can not be a consideration at first, but could become important later as you become more experienced and add more features to your website. 

TRAFFIC How much traffic or how many visitors do you expect monthly? Hosting plans are usually sold at different levels of plans according to the bandwidth that will be required. Bandwidth = Traffic. Of course, more bandwidth is better because it allows more visitors to visit your site, but initially it would be hard for you to measure. Usually the best way to go here is to start with a basic low bandwidth plan and upgrade later as traffic begins to flow to the site.

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