Choosing the Right Hosting Plan for Your Website
Selecting a hosting plan is a critical step when you want to start up a website. Prior posts from me were about domain name choice and website creation. Which brings the subject of hosting into play: Early on in your decision making process, you will want to shop for a hosting plan.
The next step after creating your website is to make it live on the internet, or publish it. 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. In it’s simplest terms a hosting plan is paying a company to broadcast your website onto the internet. Let’s go over some of the key important factors to consider when choosing a hosting plan:
SERVICE The most important consideration is the level of service provided. It does not matter that a multitude of features are offered or if the price is low if the service you will be getting with your hosting plan is sub par or even worse, nonexistent. 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. Therefore should a problem occur it is important to select a hosting provider that is readily available and will resolve the issue in as timely a manner as possible.
UPTIME What is the hosting company’s “uptime guarantee”? Many guarantee 99% uptime for their servers. Even at 99% average uptime it can mean that your website will be off the internet for over 7 hours per month. If at all possible, choose a host guaranteeing up to 99.9% uptime.
SIZE How large will the website be? The amount of disk space all of your website’s pages takes up will determine the size of the hosting plan you will need. If your website will be media rich with videos or music or photo files, or a large e-commerce site with a lot of catalogue pages, you will have to take space into consideration as a criteria for choosing the right 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. The determining factor here is what programming language was used to design the website. For example, if CGI or PHP programming language was used, the best choice for the hosting operating system would be Linux. For a website designed with ASP, the best choice would be Windows. Note that if you are simply publishing a basic html website, the choice of hosting Operating system won’t really matter as much until you get into more advanced languages such as PHP or ASP.
TRAFFIC How much traffic or how many visitors do you expect monthly? Most hosting providers sell their hosting plans on a sliding scale according to bandwith usage. The more visitors or traffic you expect on your site, the higher the bandwidth you will need, and the more the plan will cost. Usually the best way to proceed here is to start with a basic low bandwidth plan, and upgrade later as the traffic begins to flow to the website.
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. Dedicated or virtual dedicated hosting is different in the sense that you will have full control over the environment that your website resides in, and you will have the only access to that space. Dedicated server hosting gives you full control over setup of the operating system and auxilliary programs such as database management or shopping cart or database management software. This type of hosting is definitely geared to the more advanced user, and usually you won’t be able to get as much customer support because it will be a 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 StartYourWebsiteToday.com our uptime guarantee is 99.9% and we offer 24/7 customer service. We also have a selection of shared, dedicated, and virtual dedicated hosting plans to suit all budgets and sizes and types of websites. To review the options we offer, click HERE: Hosting plans.
