Great Web Hosting - What to Look For!
Web hosting can best be described as a modern-day
marriage: none of this till death do us part stuff, it’s
more like I’ll stick around as long as your uptime is 100%,
you answer my frantic queries instantly, and you charge me
less than a decent latte at Starbucks. What follows is a
few tips to help make the relationship less rocky and
possibly prosperous!
First of all, we all need to take a little responsibility
and at least figure out what we think we need from a web
host up front. This isn’t always as easy as you might
imagine. You don’t always know your exact needs ahead of
time, and sometimes these things are difficult to forsee.
Your site may become hugely popular, requiring more
bandwidth or storage than previously thought. You may
decide to have data feeds hosted on your site, which will
gobble up resources. On online store can do the same. One
way I’ve found myself in the position of having to change
web hosts is when a technology you want to use or implement
on your site isn’t supported by your host. This will (and
did!)prompt a move.
Ask friends and associates who they use. While their needs
may be somewhat different than yours, basic issues such as
support and uptime will be evident, as will cutomner
satisfaction. Check out several of the web hosting
directories, as they maintain a wealth of current
information regarding the specifics you’re interested in.
Come armed with a list of things you’re looking for and
narrow your choices down using this.
Make sure you can grow with this new host. Not only in the
size of your current sites, but also number of domains and
subdomains you can host there. If you’re anything like me, I
want to be able to get the most bang for my hosting buck!
In short, due your homework, check them out, do your part in
knowing as specifically as possible what you’re after, and
make your choice. This could be the beginning of a beautiful
friendship!
Keith Thompson is the Webmaster of Web Hosting Providers a site offering and reviewing great choices for outstanding web hosting!
Tags: affordable, cheap, ecommerce web hosting, low cost, solutions, Web HostingHost Wars! The Battle of Space (Disk Space)
Just recently, I received an email from one of the twenty hosting companies that I’m affiliated with and before I even opened it I knew what it was going to say. Pretty much the same thing that the last five emails from other hosting companies have said. “Dear Affiliate, we’re happy to announce that we’ve included more disk space to our basic hosting plans which now offer over 20,000 Mb (mega-bytes) of disk/storage space to your customers.” And the Hosting companies battle on!
Now don’t get me wrong, from a marketing and advertising viewpoint, offering my customer 20,000 Mb of disk space instead of 5 or 10 thousand is something that just “sweetens the pot.” Why not have extra space? Sometimes more is better. But unless you’re the only person on an island with an internet connection and a hosting account thats going to be used by a small third world nation, or unless you’re Ebay (TM), I don’t see where the average company, even with a website that has 100 or more pages with many graphics, is even going to come close to using 20,000 Mb of disk/storage space per month.
My modestly small website wbwebhosts dot com has twelve pages that get a total of around 200 page hits a day. Last time I checked I was averaging 2 Mb of disk/storage usage per month. Naturally, I’m sure that if everybody who was hosted with a certain company was somehow able to use 20,000 Mb of disk each month, the hosting company would run out of server space.
But thats OK though! Advertising all that storage space is a “Hook” to lure people in. Nothing wrong with that. As I said above it’s better to have too much storage space then not enough. But look for other things that the company offers they may set them apart from other web hosting services. Is the set-up and Domain free? Where are there servers located? C-panel control (very easy control panel for beginners)? Price per month? Transfer (monthly traffic allowed)?
Well the Host wars will continue! Maybe by this time next year they’ll be offering 30,000 Mb to attract new customers. To most unsuspecting people this will seem like a great deal and will be happy and feel lucky that they have found such a hosting company. By offering more disk/storage space, the hosting companies will lure more customers and affiliates, affiliates in turn will gain more customers and the customers will be happy with the excess of space. Oh well, as long as everybody is happy…..
Compare top 15 Web Hosting Companies! Hosting Plans Starting at $3.95/ Month
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Website Sitebuilders Easy to use Website builders Come with a Price
Professional web designers don’t come cheap. A good web designer can easily charge you $1000 or more for a five page website. This high cost leads many people to tackle web design for themselves. How hard can it be? Get yourself an HTML editor, throw up a website and voila! Your website is live right? Wrong! There is a lot of knowledge you need to develop before you can get your self made website onto the internet.
What is a Sitebuilder?
More and more web hosting companies today offer Sitebuilder software that takes care of all the technical details to getting your website up and live on the internet. They allow a novice to choose a built in template, select some colors, throw in some pictures, and add some text. Once these steps are done, all the novice has to do is publish their website to the internet. All the hard stuff is taken care of by the Sitebuilder software. So what’s the catch?
Next to Impossible to Move your Website to Another Company.
Most Sitebuilders in use by web hosting companies today are designed to make it as difficult as possible for their users to transfer their website away. Most, if not all the fancy features like counters, navigation, templates, etc… are built into the Sitebuilder and won’t work unless you have an active account with that particular company. If you want to take your website elsewhere, you will have to build your website again from scratch.
Cookie cutter approach tends to look amateurish
Sitebuilders in generally lack the flexibility to allow the website creator to create a website any way they like. Most Sitebuilders out there will lock you into doing things in one way - their way. This leads to websites that can look like they were just thrown together and therefore look unprofessional.
Little ability to handle traffic growth.
Most Sitebuilders come with enough storage space and monthly data transfer to meet the average website’s needs. If your website traffic truly takes off though, chances are, your Sitebuilder company will cut you off. Most hosting companies bank on the fact that 99% of it’s clients will use relatively little resources. If your website starts to use too many server resources, most companies will pull the plug on your website. If your website is built with their Sitebuilder, you’ll be out of luck and in the unenviable position of needing to rebuild your website right when a ton of traffic is hitting a dead page. Not pretty.
Sitebuilder or traditional web hosting account - which is for you?
If you have never put together a website before, and you have no desire to dive into the technical details of putting your website online, a Sitebuilder is probably your best fit. For maximum long term flexibility and growth potential, learning how to get your website live on a traditional web hosting account is well worth the effort. You will end up paying less, you won’t be locked into one company, and you will be able to grow your website as traffic demands it.
This article was written by Joe Duchesne, president of http://www.yowling.com/, a web hosting company that offers traditional Web Hosting plans. Copyright 2004 Yowling. Reprint Freely as long as you provide a clickable link back to my website from this resource box.
Tags: html editor, sitebuilder, web design, Web Hosting, website builder