Selection Criteria of Business Web Hosting
If you spend a few minutes on Internet browsing for business web hosting services, you will find thousands of web hosting companies offering various web hosting plans for you to choose from. On the bright side, ample choices mean the high chance of getting a suitable web hosting at very best price; however, should you have no clue of how to go about choosing your web hosting services, it can be very confusing and make your life difficult finding truly what you need for your website hosting.
Again, there is no one single web hosting plan that fits all, but rather depending on your purpose, budget, and specific needs of you hosting your website. Somehow to make thing easy for you, I have listed out a couple of selection criteria for an affordable business web hosting, as the following:
1. Server Location
Before you choosing any web hosting company, the first thing you need to decide is the server location, or where do you intend to host your website. There are couples of reasons for this. For instance if you reside outside of United States, say in England, and you intend to run a food catering service targeting families in England, you will prefer to host your website in UK, instead of United States.
As popular search engines tend to give your website greater weight for search engine ranking in country where your website is hosted, people are more likely to find your website in UK (i.e. better ranking) than if you are hosting your website in United States.
Secondly, if you are running your business in England, it will definitely save your time and costs talking to or visiting your web hosting company for support in UK. Generally, close vicinity also indicates faster speed of access.
However, if you foresee your business going international, U.S. business web hosting can be a very good choice as great varieties of web hosting available in United States provide good options and thus, cheaper price too!
2. Access Speed
Website access speed is a very important factor, that most people realize its importance, but have not much clues of how to go about choosing web hosting company that renders greatest access speed. Let’s make things very simple, whenever you browse through the website of any business web hosting company and you find it slow in access, and it takes awhile for the uploading of pictures, then let's stay away! If you are signing up for their web hosting plan, very likely your website access speed will be slow as well as it will be hosted in the same server.
Another way of checking the website access speed is, going to the Windows “Start” menu on the bottom left of your PC screen, and then click on “Run” and a small window will pop up. Fill in “ping yourdomain.com” then press OK. Let’s find out the average ping. The smaller the number, the faster the website is going to load from your location.
3. Reliability / Uptime
The reliability or uptime of your web hosting service is imperative and it is almost mandatory for you choosing web hosting company that warrant >99.5% uptime guarantee. The web hosting company has to ensure their refund policy is clearly stated should they fail to meet their uptime guarantee.
This factor must not be emphasized less especially if you are relying heavily on your website traffic for business. Your visitors may not visit your website again or turn to competitors’ website if they fail to access your website from the external links.
4. Hosting Disk Space
Inexperience internet users may be enticed to signing up for web hosting services that provide 350GB disk space, unlimited disk space, or extremely high disk space in their web hosting plan. These are sheer gimmick! Never fall prey into these traps and get caught into their unprofessional behavior of lying or luring users into paying something they will never use up. So I guess your next question is, how much hosting disk space do we need?
Most websites need about 20MB – 200MB of hosting disk space in average, depending the amount and size of pictures you use, video clips, emails, and general files size. Let’s take RankingPedia.com for instance; all the files and pictures take up only 77MB out of the 7.5GB memory space I have signed up from my web hosting provider, Nexcess.net. So to say, even if I am hosting 10 domain names in the same server, I do still have sufficient disk space to play with.
So, never let the “huge disk space” becomes too big a factor deciding your web hosting plan. The ground rule is, just pay for all you need.
5. Data Transfer vs. Bandwidth
I found some web hosting companies have been interchangeably using the words “data transfer” and “bandwidth” referring to the same. Be it intentionally or not, the inappropriate uses of these words by some web hosting companies have led to confusion and misperception in choosing web hosting services. Let me get them clarified.
Data transfer always related to the website traffic, as a result of the number of visits made by unqiue visitors. That means, the higher the number of your web pages visited, the bigger the file size viewed or downloaded, the higher will be the data transfer.
Whereby, bandwidth refers to the amount of data transferred per second (s). The bandwidth determines the website access speed, and how fast the files can be accessed or downloaded.
So, how much data transfer and bandwidth a website needs? If your average web page size stands at 60kb per page and there are 50,000 pages viewed each month, it translates into data transfer of 3GB a month. Most websites today use less than 5 GB of data transfer a month, and only the very popular websites use up to 30GB of data transfer per month. About the bandwidth requirement, websites generally use less than 250MB, or less than 3GB a month. For a start, very likely you will need something less than this.
Again, I want you to beware of web hosting company that offers unlimited bandwidth or data transfer. From our data transfer requirement stated above, you will know it is gimmick trying to lure you into signing up for their web hosting service by taking advantage of inexperience internet users. So, never go for web hosting companies that offer ridiculous 350GB or unlimited data transfer web hosting service.
Believe me, nothing is free comes to this. They will charge you somehow if your website generates too heavy the traffic and affect the overall performance of the server. Instead of spelling out the exact data transfer requirement, they may just bury the clause in their term of service and redefine it to their preference. So, stay out!
6. Server Operating System
Among the two types of server operating systems, Unix Hosting and Windows-based hosting, Unix hosting is the most commonly-used server operating system for a few good reasons; it is a freeware and more stable compared to Windows based operating system.
7. Customer Service & Technical Support
It is important for your business website getting 24/7 telephone support, ticketing support system, fast response, and consist of team of technical support personnel those are competent enough on technical issues. Many web hosting companies do provide 24/7 customer service and technical support as they claim, but it is always safer for you to test them out. Let’s give them a call during the public holiday, or drop them an email at night over the weekend, ask them questions from the most basic to highly technical question. From their speed and quality of response, you can decide better to sign up with web hosting provider that makes you feel good working with.
8. Other Web Hosting Features
It would be too lengthy and technical talking about all the server and web hosting features and functionalities. Anyhow, you may also need SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) if you wish to host an eCommerce store to facilitate online payment transaction; Most hosting providers include Control Panel with your hosting plan for you to make your own changes and server configurations; as well as some other features such as MySQL, .htaccess, PHP, FTP, and Perl.
9. Pricing
The rules of thumb are – While the cheapest are not always the best, neither nor the most expensive web hosting services are! Based on criteria I have talked about so far, you should be able to choose and decide your web hosting services based on your purposes, specific needs, time and budget allocation.
Let's make a compromise between the web hosting features you need and the pricing they offer, and always choose from only the established and popular web hosting providers.
Don’t be tricked by very cheap web hosting plan that offers “unlimited” bandwidth, it may ultimately cost you even more!
Lastly, pay for only all you need. Don’t be over ambitious with high bandwidth, high disk space, and tones of features that you have never heard of. The chance is, you may not need it now, and it is fine as long as the web hosting provider allows you to upgrade your hosting plan when your business grows in the future.
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