Choosing a Hosting Plan for Your New Website
Selecting a hosting plan is a critical step when you want to start up a website. In prior posts I discussed choosing a domain name and creation of web pages. Which brings the subject of hosting into play: Choosing a hosting plan is a primary step in launching your fledgling web presence.
Once you have created the pages for your website, now you want to publish it to the internet. To have your website seen on the internet you will need to choose a hosting plan. A hosting plan is different from a domain name. You own your domain name but you rent a hosting plan. In it’s simplest terms a hosting plan is paying a company to broadcast your website onto the internet. 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. 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 Does the hosting provider you are considering offer an “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! If at all possible, choose a host guaranteeing up to 99.9% uptime.
SIZE How large will the website be? Most hosting providers set the pricing on their hosting plans according to the space taken up on their servers by the website. 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. 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. 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. 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 StartYourWebsiteToday.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.
