Choosing the Right Hosting Plan for Your Website
So you think you want to start up a website. Prior posts from me were about domain name choice and website creation. Which brings the subject of hosting into play: Early on in your decision making process, you will want to shop for a hosting plan.
Once your website has been created, it is time to make it go live on 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. To make your website live on the internet you will be paying a service provider to publish it for you. That’s what a hosting plan is. Let’s go over some of the key important factors to consider when choosing a hosting plan:
SERVICE The most important consideration is the level of service provided. No consideration, including price, should supersede Good Customer Service as the criteria for choosing your hosting provider. Once your website is live on the internet you will want it to be up all the time. For that reason you want to be sure and choose a hosting provider that will provide the best uptime as well the best availability and quality of customer service.
UPTIME When shopping for a hosting company, find out if they have an uptime guarantee. Many guarantee 99% uptime for their servers. Even at 99% average uptime it can mean that your website will be off the internet for over 7 hours per month. If at all possible, choose a host guaranteeing up to 99.9% uptime.
SIZE What size, or how many pages will the website have? One of the determining factors for the price of most hosting plans is the amount of space required to store the website on their server’s hard drive. 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 This question refers to the operating systems available for hosting and which one to choose. This question has no relevance to the brand of operating system you are using on your computer. The determining factor here is what programming language was used to design the website. For example, if CGI or PHP programming language was used, the best choice for the hosting operating system would be Linux. For a website designed with ASP, the best choice would be Windows. 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. Obviously more bandwidth is better because it allows more visitors to visit your site, but at the beginning this will be hard for you to gauge. The best advice here is to start off with a low cost, low bandwidth plan and upgrade it later as the traffic to your website grows.
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. This type of hosting is definitely geared to the more advanced user, and usually you won’t be able to get as much customer support because it will be a custom setup. The bottom line: start off with shared hosting if you are a beginner, until you are advanced enough to progress to your own controlled dedicated hosting environment.
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.