Ways To Locate The Best Website Hosting For Your Particular Needs (Marvin Dreyer)
Aug 26, 2010
The number of websites on the web have doubled every couple of years since the Internet first made its appearance. These sites all have something in common: they must be hosted somewhere on a web server. There is thus a huge and expanding market for website hosting. In fact, there's such a large number of web hosts that newcomers to the scene can find it quite confusing. Below we will attempt to give some guidelines to help you make a choice.
As a matter of principle, you should not pay for anything you don't require. If you have a private website with a couple of vacation pictures, you will most likely be happy with what a free hosting account can offer you. Many ISPs give a limited amount of hosting space for free with their Internet access account. If you are not that lucky, you should no have a problem to find a free web host on the Internet.
A free hosting account has a couple of drawbacks though. In the first place it's unlikely that you will be able to use a top level domain name, such as yourowndomain.com. The most common situation is that you will have to use a subdomain provided by the hosting company. For a personal website this is normally not a huge problem. What could be more problematic for many people is that the hosting company usually displays banner ads at the top of each page.
If free hosting is for some or other reason not for you, your only other option is a paid account. You will of course be able to host a domain name that goes well with your website's content, such as myownwidgetcompany.com for example. You usually also get a decent amount of data transfer and disk space - more than what most free accounts provide. On top of that there will be no restriction on the use of programming scripts and languages such as javascript, Java, PHP and Perl/cgi.
When it comes to the amount of disk space and bandwidth that you buy, beware of what is called overselling in the industry. Some hosting companies provide 'unlimited' web hosting and data transfer for a few dollars per month. Then they have a clause somewhere in their terms and conditions which states that if you use more than a certain amount, your account gets suspended.
It's probably better to buy the amount of bandwidth and disk space that you really need. Unless you plan to upload hordes of videos or thousands of pictures, your website is unlikely to need more than 1Gb of space. To provide you with an idea of how far 1Gb can go: it's sufficient to host more than 10 000 web pages if they don't contain more than one or two postcard sized pictures each.
If you plan to sell anything on your website, you will most likely need facilities for a shopping card. Most hosting companies provide that. If you just link to an outside payment processor where the customer will provide his credit card details, you don't have a problem. If you want to accept credit cards on your own website, you will also need a secure server, a dedicated IP number and a security certificate.
Website hosting companies are not all the same. Make sure that the company you choose promises in excess of 99.7% uptime and offers a refund if you experience large periods of downtime. They should also provide technical support around the clock, seven days a week. It's very frustrating to be stuck with a website that's down and nobody to assist you over a weekend.
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