One of the most critical decisions to make in having your own website is choosing your web hosting provider.
On the stage planning of your website, you or your designer mostly leaves this behind. But in reality it plays a big role in your web sites functionality, performance and lifespan, not to mentioned growth. Heck yah you have an award winning website you paid your designer for 30k or you developed your website for countless weeks or month and just fall down in frustration because your web hosting provider doesn't support your scripting language or is always down. Now is that happy ending or what?
Oftentimes we don't even care to choose the right hosting provider. We just want our website to be up and running. Well if that is the case, you should really be wise in choosing the right provider. Scene such as site is down for 3 days or you need to present your folio to a prospected client but is inaccessible at the moment? Or another scenario is that your web hosting provider is incommunicable for so long you’re your not even sure if they are still in operation or dead! Now would you trust your website to any hosting provider?
The three major traits to look for a web hosting company is the guarantee of reliability, support when it matters most and affordability. These three factors are the most important decision in choosing your web-hosting provider. Now let's break this down to bytes so we can understand more.
Reliability, most hosting company will tell you this. Yes, everybody claims they are reliable but how do you know they are reliable? They should be able to live up to their claim about their uptime guarantee. 99% is the industry standard so you can asks about reliability and how transparent their uptime is. See if they have some uptime monitor and analyze the server uptime statistics. This should at least give you an impression what to expect when it comes to reliability. You can also ask some of that company's clients and get the word out of their experience.
Support, how well and how your provider delivers it, when you need it. Ask your web host if they offer support such as, telephone support, email support or even chat support. With this you should be in good hand. Just make sure you are able to talk to a real live person when you call their phone ;) You don’t know when is the time you'll need one.
Affordability. Ah yes at last affordable web hosting! Need not to say that hosting should be made affordable. Checkout prices and compare features is how you determine the affordability of the provider. Just make sure your web host doesn't sacrifice affordability for service, otherwise it's not worth the price.
Lastly it all boils down on whom you trust and what you really needs. If your looking for a hosting company to host your site and meets most of your requirements then go for it, if not I suggest you do some little comparative test. Get a couple of hosting providers and compare side by side who and what you think gives the most balance price/performance/feature ratio.
Hope this helps in choosing your new web host.
While on the net, go to our website at www.marvinsweb.net.
Give us a try; we might be the one you're looking for ;)
