Your Online Business Is Only As Good As Your Webhost
No even remotely smart person sets out when building a website to find anything except great web hosting. Why would you deliberately go out and sign yourself up with a crappy hosting company? Of course it doesn’t make any sense – you’re going to need a web hosting company you can trust that isn’t going to break the bank.
Do they exist? Of course – some hosting companies actually do their best for their customers. They understand that without customers they have no business.
So what should be on your checklist when you’re shopping for cheap and reliable web hosting?
The first thing I’d suggest looking at is the quality of the technical support. There’s no point in saving a small fortune on hosting costs if your website is constantly offline or gets defaced/hacked every other week. You should be able to get support 24/7 by some means – even if it’s just by e-mail. You’d be smart to check if the hosting company outsource their technical support. Outsourcing isn’t a sin but can be a nightmare when you realize their tech guys don’t know their https from their ftp.
Their quality of customer support is going to be important too – any questions you ask before you even sign up should be answered in a professional and prompt way. Anything less than this is a bad omen for the future.
This brings me on to the next important hosting shopping item – uptime! Uptime is basically the percentage of each day that your site is online. Ok in an ideal world you’d expect your site to be online 24/7 100% of the time with zero glitches. This isn’t realistic folks – the best you can get out there is a 99% uptime guarantee. Anything less than that and you need to walk away and find a hosting company worth dealing with.
Next you need to look at your disk space and bandwidth. This is the easy bit of choosing a web hosting package – the more of each the better. Disk space is the amount of storage space you’ll have online for storing html files, pictures, videos or mp3s. Your bandwidth is how much information can be downloaded from your website each month. If you run out of disk space or bandwidth your website becomes a dead duck in cyberspace – floating face down in a sea of digital static.
You can have your cake and eat it too – there are cheap web hosting packages that offer great technical and customer support, great uptime and a whole pile of features that you’ll just love using.
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