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How_To_Select_A_Good_Website_Hosting_Company
| How To Select A Good Website Hosting Company
I constantly encounter people that want me to design or update a
website for them, and they are already signed up with a hosting
company. The only problem is that many of these people should
never have signed up with that particular hosting company. I'm
dealing with a client now who is paying almost two and a half
times more a month than she should, and the service the hosting
company provides is substandard.
I run into many problems with hosting companies, including:
Prices being too high. I often see people paying $15 to $25
a month, when the average is $9 or less. The $15 to $25 fee is
okay, if you are getting monthly updates, or some other service,
from a website designer. Very important features are
missing, such as form handling and some e-mail features. You
can only post websites that you make using their design
software. This means you must stay with them or completely
redesign your website if you decide to go to another hosting
company. If you can't recreate your website you will wind up
paying hundreds or thousands of dollars to have someone else do
it. Terrible technical support. I have called technical
support at several hosting companies to get some needed
information only to be told, "We aren't going to help you with
that." You usually hear this response from companies that really
don't care about their clients. The hosting company has
listed themselves as the owner of the domain name. This means
that they own your domain, you don't. This is considered very
unethical. It can take months to have your name put on as owner,
if they will do this at all. Do you own your domain name? Go to
http://www.WhoIs.com and do a search for your domain. You should
be listed as the registrant. If this is not the case, then you
don't own your domain.
The features offered by web hosts vary widely, as do their
costs. Following are the minimum features a decent hosting
company should offer, in my opinion. A minimum of 500
MB of storage space. This is equal to about 500,000 pages of
text. Yes, this is more space than you will probably ever use,
but quite a few web hosting services offer this amount. I have
almost 150 pages on my website and over 300 graphics, but I only
use 38 MB of disk space on the server. Unlimited POP3 E-mail
Accounts. This lets you have an unlimited number of e-mail
accounts so you can keep e-mails separated for different
departments or personnel. 6 GB (Gigabytes) of data transfer
(bandwidth) per month. This is equal to about 6,000,000 pages of
text. If you have a website that contains 10 pages, and each
page is a MB (Megabyte) and a person goes to each of your pages,
then that person would have used 10 MB of your bandwidth. No
long-term contract. You should be free to pay monthly, quarterly
or annually. The longer you sign up for the less it will cost
you. Also check into what happens if you want to cancel the
hosting service. Will you get any unused money back?
Technical support should be available 24 hours a day, seven
days a week. You should be able to contact technical support by
phone (with a toll free number) and e-mail. Unlimited e-mail
autoresponders, so you can set up links on your site that will
automatically send information via e-mail when a person clicks
on the link. A control panel or site manager so you can
control all the aspects of your website, including e-mail,
backups and software installation. You should also be able to
check your site statistics to see how many hits each page is
getting. Mail list manager, so if you have an ezine you can
manage your list of subscribers. 30-day money back
guarantee. Many hosting companies don't offer this, but many do.
The hosting company I use is Westhost (www.Westhost.com), and
they offer all of these features, and more.
Avoid Free Hosting like the plague. These hosts don't charge a
monthly fee, but they do put ads on your site. These ads may run
across the top, the side or pop-up anywhere on the screen.
People find these ads annoying and distracting. Using a free
hosting service will put many people off and you will lose
visitors. Customers will also be more reluctant to buy any
products or services from you. Would you buy something from a
business that couldn't afford to pay $5-$10 a month for website
hosting? It will also be more difficult for people to remember
you web address. Instead of www.Acme.com, your web address may
well be www.TheFreeSite.com/acme.html. And if the company goes
out of business, then your site is gone and all the listings you
have on search engines will no longer work.
Free sites may also change the rules about what you can have on
your site. You may suddenly find that one or more of your pages
are banned because of their content. I started out with free
hosting years ago, but soon outgrew it and had to buy my own
domain name, create a new website and start all over again
getting my pages listed with search engines. When my free site
was removed, all the links on search engines to that site no
longer worked.
Avoid a hosting company that gives you Shared or Virtual
Hosting. Shared hosting means that the server, the computer
where your website resides, is shared with possibly hundreds of
websites who all use the same server software. The hosting
company gives you a certain amount of storage space on the
server's hard drive for your site, and that hard drive stores as
many sites as space allows. The problem is that since all the
websites are sharing the same server software, if one website is
attacked by a virus or hacker and the server software is
damaged, then all the websites on that server will be affected
the same way that single site is affected.
Look for a host that offers a Virtual Private Server. This means
that your website resides in a partitioned section of the server
and has its own server software. I've used Westhost for several
years with no problems. They have great tech support and
constantly improve the features they offer. You can find a
banner link to them at the bottom of my page at
http://www.creativecauldron.com/WebsiteDesign.shtml
To look for other web hosting services try these links.
Compare Web Hosts
http://www.comparewebhosts.com/BudgetWebHosting.asp
Consumers Review
http://www.consumersreview.org/webhosting.html Host Index
http://www.hostindex.com/ Web Hosting Reviews
http://www.web-hosting-reviews.org/ Web Hosting Unleashed
http://www.webhostingunleashed.com/ Web Site Hosting
http://www.web-site-hosting.md/ Webhosting Top 10
http://www.webhosting-top10.com/us32/
As you check out web hosting services you will encounter some
words that you may not have heard before. Here's some useful
terminology that will clear things up for you. Auto
Responder - An automated program that, when it receives an
e-mail, sends out an e-mail with a message and/or attachment to
the person who sent the e-mail. This is often used with websites
that sell ebooks and other electronic information. The person
clicks on an e-mail link for the ebook they want and the
autoresponder sends it to them. It's a real time saver.
Bandwidth (Data Transfer) - This is the amount of
data that you or others upload to your site and download from
your site. A typical site uses less than 5 GB (Gigabytes) per
month. CGI Bin - the Common Gateway Interface bin is
where programs are stored that let you put things on your site
like a guestbook and bulletin board. Control Panel -
This is an interface that lets you control the tools, settings
and utilities that your web host provides. Disk Space
- This is the amount of space you have on the server's hard
drive to store your website. Unless your site is loaded with
graphics, which it shouldn't be, then you don't need a lot of
space. FTP - File Transfer Protocol is a common way
to upload and download your website pages and files.
Once you find a few place you like, check them out at the Better
Business Bureau at http://bbb.org/ and do a search on Yahoo and
Google to see if anyone has posted anything bad about them.
It can be difficult to know what to look for in a hosting
company if you're new to the Internet. The best solution is to
do a lot of research, talk to people you know who have websites
and start trying different hosts who offer a 30-day money back
guarantee. As long as you own your domain name, and you have
created your own website, or had someone create it for you, then
you will be fine. With these two things done, you can take your
site to almost any host without any problems.
About the author:
http://www.CreativeCauldron.com Jeff Colburn is a website
designer and writer. His goal is to make the process of creating
or updating your website easy and simple for you, while creating
a website that meets all your needs and expectations. Jeff can
also create all of the copy for your website.
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