So you think you want to start up a website.  Prior posts from me were about domain name choice and website creation.  Now let’s talk a little about hosting:  Early on in your decision making process, 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.  Publishing to the internet involves getting 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.  To make your website live on the internet you will be paying a service provider to publish it for you.  That’s what a hosting plan is.  The key considerations for choosing a good hosting plan will be discussed here.

SERVICE  The most important consideration is the level of service provided.  Bells and whistles and fancy features will do you no good if you can’t get customer service in a timely fashion.  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.  For that reason you want to be sure and choose a hosting provider that will provide the best uptime as well the best availability and quality of customer service.

UPTIME  What is the hosting company’s “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! The best hosting providers will have a track record of up to 99.9% uptime, which essentially guarantees you that downtime is negligible or even non-existent.

SIZE  What size, or how many pages will the website have?  Most hosting providers set the pricing on their hosting plans according to the space taken up on their servers by the website.  Most websites do not require much space but if you’re planning on having a large site with a lot of multimedia content or an ecommerce site selling multiple items, you’ll probably need additional disk space on your 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.  What programming language was used in the Web site design?  For example, if you designed a website using ASP or ASP.NET, you’ll need to find a Windows hosting plan. If you have a Web site that uses CGI or PHP, you’ll need to get a Linux hosting plan.  For the novice user who is building a simple html website the above may not be a consideration at first, but may become important later on 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 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  The question of shared vs. dedicated hosting is really answered in a very simple way:  A shared hosting plan is exactly as it sounds, and means that your website will be stored on a server along with lots of other websites.  In this hosting format you generally have no ability to make changes to the resident software on the system, meaning you cannot change or upgrade the operating system, or the database management system, etc.  You will have to work within the software structure provided by the hosting company.  Using dedicated (or virtual dedicated) hosting means that you have full control over the server your website is stored on and that only your data occupies the space on that server.  In other words, you would determine what operating system to use, what type database management software, what type of blog software, what type shopping cart, etc., etc.  Generally customer support will be low to non-existent, since this type of hosting is geared to the advanced user who will be using his own custom setup.  The best advice I can give to the newbie is to use shared hosting at first, until you gain more experience and abilities and are ready to take the plunge into something as advanced as dedicated hosting.

At StartMyWebsiteToday.com our uptime guarantee is 99.9% and we offer 24/7 customer service.  The hosting plans that are offered include a variety: shared hosting, virtual dedicated hosting, and dedicated hosting plans with either Linux or Windows operating systems for every need and budget ranging from the small personal website to large online multimedia sites to those interested in ecommerce website building. To review the options we offer, click HERE: Hosting plans.

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