Choose the Right Web Host for Your Website
There are an estimated 800,000 new websites created every day1, which has created a huge demand for web hosting services. This has caused a boom in web hosting companies that are competing hard for your business and has brought the price of web hosting down to as little as a few dollars per month. At the same time, improvements in the technology that supports the Internet has improved and so the services that are being offered have been improving as well.
It can be difficult, especially if you aren’t technically minded, to see beyond price to the difference between the various web hosts and the services they are offering, but often the cheapest deal isn’t the best one. There are several factors to consider in order to be sure to choose the right one for your website.
It is common now for web hosts to offer a lot of unlimited features like bandwidth, disk space and domain hosting. For many of the cheaper web hosts, selling limited packages is the way that they cut costs in order to be able to offer such large discounts on their cheapest deals. If you are a hobby blogger then you are unlikely to need an unlimited number of domains or e-mail addresses, so it may be more cost effective to go with a simple shared hosting plan. For most business users it is quite likely that they will want to use video or audio files, display a large number of product images and use multiple domain names for their different brands. In this instance, being able to handle large amounts of traffic and the need for a lot of e-mail addresses with require unlimited bandwidth and domain hosting features. Even medium-sized businesses can outgrow a shared web hosting account, and if you are using a virtual desktop or other cloud-based services, a virtual private server (VPS) or even a dedicated server account may better suit your needs.
In most cases, businesses will meet their needs with a generous shared hosting account and will use it to create a few websites for their different Internet applications, so the web host management interface that comes with your account will be a significant factor in how practical the web host is for you. For the most part, web hosts use a control panel that allows users to install new websites with a few clicks, but many of the cheapest web hosting plans require users to have more technical knowledge of web design, and supply very little in the way of design and management tools. The most common management platform in use at the moment is cPanel, which is very user friendly and comes ready to install dozens of scripts for building websites and other online activities.
For commercial users, it is also important that their web hosting account comes with the secure socket layer (SSL) pages and shopping cart scripts that they will need to set up their online retail site and conduct transactions themselves. These features are often the very ones that are not included with the cheapest web hosting deals on offer and have to be purchased from a third party or by upgrading the account.
It is also worth testing the quality of the 24/7 technical support by calling them at irregular hours, such as 3am, to see if they can resolve your problems in spite of the strange hour. If you already have a website and you want to move it, you will want to have free transfers included too. To get professional advice on web hosting, contact Infintech Designs and let us go through your web hosting options to find the best solution for your website.
References:
1. http://infographicsmania.com/data-never-sleeps/
