Picking the best host for your website depends more on what you hope to accomplish with your site than how much the monthly plan costs or what kind of features it comes with. This is because picking a cheap web hosting company that costs less or has more padded features doesn’t make any sense if it is lacking in basics like updated software, enough disk space and bandwidth, and a state-of-the-art data center. Probably the biggest mistake that people make when they choose a host for the first time is to go for the web hosting company that is the cheapest and has the longest list of features – even when they don’t know what those features do! If you are new to the Internet, do yourself a favor and pick a web host based on what you are really expecting to accomplish with your site and you will be much better off.
The first thing you have to ask yourself is how much experience do you have? If you haven’t ever built a web site before, your site can still look professional, but you aren’t going have enough coding skills to be able to create all of the advanced elements that some other sites have, like drop down menus and rollover buttons. It’s always better for beginning web developers to use the free site builder that comes with a cheap web hosting package. It won’t create the website of your dreams, but it will allow you to use some tricks like Flash and help you understand how to build a website. Building a web site is sort of like learning to drive. It’s better to start out with the family car than it is to go wreck a high-end Porsche the first time you drive. So the first thing you should look for in a web hosting company is the best free sitebuilder that you can find. This is the best learning tool to help you understand web development. Alternatively, you can also purchase FrontPage, which will give you many more options, but still has enough wizards to make building a web site essentially a point and click project.
Speaking of software, another thing to look for when you pick a web hosting company is how updated their software is. If you do know something about web hosting you may see some hosting applications that you like, but are they the latest versions? For example, if a company offers FrontPage support, it needs to be for 2003 or 2008. Anything before that is fairly useless. The same goes with the operating system. Especially watch out for Windows hosting. Windows hosting is expensive to update because it is licensed software and not every hosting company purchases and configures the latest versions. If you are depending on using certain software for your website, always ask about it. The best hosting company for your website will support your software.
The next thing to look for is the amount of disk space and bandwidth a shared web hosting package provides you per month. If you are just starting out, a shared hosting plan is what you are looking for when it come to hosting packages. Shared hosting means that the files for your website will be on a computer with a lot of other web sites, with each one having its own space. So disk space refers to the amount of space your web files will get on the computer (referred to as the server), and bandwidth refers to how many times people can download your site every month. Most decent shared hosting packages these days will give you 1,500 GB of disk space and 15,000 GB of data transfer. Some budget web hosting companies call this ‘unlimited’ but either way, this is the amount you should look for in a low cost web hosting package. If you are planning on having a large ecommerce site, you might want to look into virtual private server hosting or dedicated hosting, which both have more disk space and bandwidth. You will also need to hire a web developer to help you build a site this large as well. If you are just starting out, and under the impression that you can build a huge ecommerce web site with a free site builder and put it on a shared hosting plan, then you are sadly mistaken. Shared hosting plans and free site builders are for new web developers who have smaller businesses, organizational sites, or personal sites. If you plan something larger, you will need to look for an affordable web hosting company that has dedicated hosting plans. A customer service rep from the hosting company or an independent web developer can talk with you about larger ecommerce sites if that’s what you have in mind.
At this point, you have probably looked at quite a few web hosting companies, and based on the best free site builder and a suitable amount of disk space and bandwidth, you have probably narrowed down your choices to a few different ones. Now it’s time to look at the data center of each company. This is really important because it will let you know much more about a company than they would probably like you to know. The data center is the facility where a hosting company stores all of its computers, which is also where the files for your live web site will be stored. The data center is physically made up of three parts: the computers, the connections, and the security. The computers (or servers) are what store your data, and the connection is what gets your data to the outside world. The security is the facility where the computers are housed, the software that protects them from hackers, and the backup systems that keep your data safe.
When a hosting company promises 99.9% uptime, what they are talking about is the amount of time that your site is viewable and functioning on the Internet. This time is based on fact that the three elements of a datacenter are state-of-the-art and always working. The hosting company’s web site probably has a blurb about the servers they use and where they are housed, but since you can’t ever go there, how do you know that any of this is true? You can’t really, but you can do a little investigating to get a better idea of what the data center is really like.
The first thing to do is go to the ‘about us’ page and find out where the company is located. Then, find out where the data center is. What you want to find out is whether the hosting company leases or owns their data center. If a company owns its data center, this can be a good thing or a bad thing. The good thing about a hosting company that owns its data center is that they have more control over it, so if anything goes wrong, you can call customer service and get an idea of when the data center will be up and running again. This is because a hosting company that owns its data center also has its own technicians and they will be able to tell you when things will be working again because they know exactly what is wrong.
The bad side of a company that owns its data center is that they may not be able to keep up the cost. It is very expensive to run a data center, and to cut costs, a cheap web hosting company may start with the data center. Questions that you need to ask a company that own its data center are: “How old are the computers?”, and “How many shared hosting accounts do you have on each one?” They might not tell you, but if the company is smaller and they rely on your payments of $4.95 a month to pay for an entire data center, be careful. The rule of thumb when it comes to data centers is that if the company is small, look for one that leases their data center, and if they are large, it is better if they own it. Large companies that don’t own their own data center will tend to shuffle you around because they don’t always know why the data center is experiencing problems.
Last but not least, another deciding factor when choosing the best hosting company for your website is the customer service department. Customer service is important because they are the people who can answer questions, like when the servers will be up and running again and can also help you with a technical question, like why something on your hosting plan isn’t working. Make sure that these people work directly for the hosting company. If these customer service reps are outsourced, that means that they are employees of an outside customer service company. They only have access to information on that they are given, and there are times when they will not be able to help you. Some of these customer service companies are even located in another country. When looking for a host, it is better to have an in-house customer service team. Something else to look for is a hosting company with technical chat rooms or community forums. This is because many people think that customer service reps are there to teach them how to build a web site or how to use software, but they aren’t. Customer service reps can help you with technical problems, but they can’t teach you web development.
Picking the best host for you web site will ultimately come down to which affordable hosting company you like the best, but if you know what to look out for and know what to expect, you will be much happier with the hosting company you have chosen.
