This post is the 3rd in a 4-part series outlining the essential steps in getting a website up and running. If you missed our posts on how to choose a domain name and how to register a domain name, we suggest you have a look at those first.
Now that you’ve decided on and registered a domain name, you’ll need to host your domain name for your website. As registering a domain name can be compared to registering a business name in the offline world, hosting a website is like renting office or retail space for your store. Companies who offer hosting services are called “Web Hosting Providers”, or “Web Hosts”, and choosing the right web host for your website is one of the most important decisions you will make during the entirety of your online campaign.
As you can imagine, choosing the right web host for you is much more involved than selecting the first company that comes up in a “web host” search in Google or Yahoo. Keep in mind that just because you may have heard of a company provides web hosting services does not mean they are great at what they do – there are plenty of big hosting companies that have made their name through marketing and branding, but not necessarily through quality of service. If you want to do your own research into a good web hosting provider, here are some questions you need to ask:
- Do they offer free 24/7 support? This is very important – you or your web designer/developer will need to establish good lines of communication with your web host.
- What kind of disk space and bandwidth do they offer? The disk space allows for the size of the website, where 100MB of disk space is more than enough for most websites. Bandwidth pertains to data transfer rate, or the amount of data that can be passed to and from a website during a period of time. If your website plans to host videos, audio or other multimedia, you will need more bandwidth. To be on the safe side, I’d suggest looking for a web host who offers at least 10GB of monthly bandwidth, which is quite a lot.
- Uptime Guarantees. Find a web host who can give you guaranteed uptime (the amount of time your website is guaranteed to be live when queried) statistics. This should be not less than 99.5%.
- Contracts. Try to avoid web hosts who want you to commit to contracts for minimum amounts of time. You will want to find a host where you can cancel at anytime without penalty.
- Cost. Look for a host who charges you a flat monthly rate, and ensure there are no added fees/maintenance fees. Unless you have tens of thousands of daily visitors right off the bat, beginner/small business hosting packages should be more than sufficient. Hosting fees are usually billed monthly, and should be less than $20 per month.
Given these requirements, we’ve put together a short list of some of the better hosting companies out there if you wanted to compare on your own:
FatCow.com
Aplus.net
BlueHost.com
HostGator.com
Customer reviews have shown these are some of the most reliable and customer-service friendly web hosting providers out there. Take a look on your own, and if you decide to go with any of these, feel free to let us know your experience so we can keep up the quality.
Tags: choosing a web host, hosting, how to choose a web host, web host, web hosting
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wow what a interesting post , its really
Thanks for the nice post. I always like to bookmark coding or webmaster related posts like this one.
Thanks for the SEO insight! I have a question, hoping someone here could answer it. I tried ‘on page seo’ for my site, as well as getting backlinks. However I’m still not getting any visible results! Do you have any other advice for backlinking? I tried what I could understand already. Thanks again!!