10 Criteria For Selecting a Hosting Company

What should you look for when selecting a hosting company?

You want to select a hosting company based on their service and support, the reliability of the company, the speed and quality of their servers, cost, the web space and bandwidth they provide, and the availability of features such as pop email accounts, statistics, and autoreponders.

1. Service/Support

It's vital that you can reach your host 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. If your web site is down for several hours, it might cost you hundreds or thousands of dollars in sales. Customer service is the most important consideration in choosing a web host.

2. Reliability of the Hosting Company

Make sure the hosting company is reliable, has been in business at least two years, and has good ratings with the Better Business Bureau and Dun & Bradstreet.

A server should be up at least 99 percent of the time. Ask if the host has back-up servers available they can use when the server is down. Request testimonials and a list of satisfied customers.

3. Fast and Reliable Servers

Choose a hosting company that uses fast and reliable servers.

4. Cost

Hosting for a basic business web site shouldn't cost more than $25 per month. You could pay higher fees if you need more features but don't pay for features you don't need.

5. Web Space

Most web hosts offer more storage space than you'll ever need. You may need additional space if you are offering a lot of free downloads like software demos, videos, images, free ebooks, and similar items.

6. Bandwidth

Bandwidth is how much data can be transferred at a time or the speed of the server. Make sure you won't have to pay additional fees when your transfer volume increases. 10 GB bandwidth will be enough for most sites. Images, audio and video files take up more space and bandwidth than text files. If you're offering a lot of downloads, you might need more.

7. POP-email Accounts

POP email accounts allow you to use email software to receive your incoming emails instead of having to log in to a web site to check your email. I believe that most hosting accounts provide this feature today.

8. Support for ecommerce

Many hosting companies provide ecommerce tools such as a shopping cart system. Even if your host provides a shopping cart, you may need a more sophisticated system from a specialized company.

9. Statistics

You need to know the number of visitors you receive daily, weekly, and monthly, which sites they came from, and which pages have been accessed.

10. Autoresponders

Most hosting companies provide autoresponders but most are not sequential autoresponders and they are not working with web forms. You may need a more sophisticated autoresponder from a third-party company.

The most important part of hosting is reliability. In addition to the features you need, it's important for your web designer that a hosting company provides a user-friendly control panel. Your professional web designer can help you choose a hosting company.

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When to Upgrade to a Dedicated Server From Cheap Web Hosting

While the thought of always paying as little as two figures per month for hosting is definitely appealing, you should expect to outgrow a certain hosting plan at one point or another. Every webmaster out there wants more traffic and the more traffic you receive, the more you'll have to pay for hosting.

But What If I Don't Upgrade?

There's only so much a cheap shared hosting plan can do for you and, once you start receiving a lot of traffic, you can count on at least one of these two things happening:

* your hosting provider will kick you out and, even if it may sound crazy, they're not doing absolutely anything illegal: read their Terms and Conditions carefully and you'll find out yourself that there are certain clauses which basically allow them to show you the door whenever they feel like it
* your server will run incredibly slow or will crash extremely often

The two consequences are anything but a dream come true. If your hosting provider kicks you out because you don't want to upgrade, your website will basically stay offline until you find another host. On the other hand, if your server ends up being very slow and crashes a lot, you can count on your website being offline quite often and, even when it will be available, the experience of your visitors won't exactly be very pleasant.

Let Your Host Help

Once you notice that you've outgrown your current hosting package, contact your hosting company directly and ask them for an opinion. They do want you to continue taking advantage of their services, so it's in their best interest to help you find a good solution.

A responsible hosting company will basically suggest a couple of packages which would work well and let you make the final choice. If you were taking advantage of a shared hosting package and didn't see a dramatic increase in traffic, a Virtual Private Server will probably do. But if you've noticed some explosive growth and have every reason to believe that things are only going to get better, going dedicated would be the smart thing to do.

How to Negotiate?

If you've been a customer for a long time, that puts you in a position to negotiate some good deals. Once you contact them, most hosting providers will not automatically throw their best offer at you. You have to be smart about it and negotiate: let them know that you are looking into a lot of other options as well and tell them that you're interested in finding out what their best offer is before making your final choice.

While you shouldn't expect a spectacular discount, the offer you will receive will probably help you save quite a bit down the road. Assuming that a company you've worked great with in the past offers you a nice discount when upgrading, it should be obvious that sticking with the company in question is the best thing to do.

Read more articles about cheap web hosting and find an affordable dedicated server based on user feedback.

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Dedicated Or Shared Web Hosting - Which One is Better?

One of the biggest arguments in choosing the best web hosting service provider comes through when people sit and argue about which type of web hosting provider to be chosen. Now, the discussion is not on whether to choose free or paid ones. The basis of the argument is to choose between Dedicated and Shared Web Hosting services.

In most cases though, you would find that the Dedicated web hosting services are paid ones, but with that being said, it offers some advantages, which could beat shared web hosting services completely.

Let us first try and understand what these web hosting services mean. Dedicated web hosting means that your website would be provided with a certain amount of space, and that space or bandwidth as it is called, is all yours. No other website would have the option of being hosted in the space. This could mean you can play around with your website, of course, within the space allocated to you. Importantly, if there are any errors coming through, the technical troubleshooting team would be able to spot and fix it without a lot of delay.

Shared web hosting services is where a certain amount of space is shared in hosting some websites. How many websites are hosted through the shared web space depends entirely on how much space is available and how big are the websites. Often, you would find that most of the technical issues of people come through from shared web hosting providers. This is where technical support teams apparently face a lot of issues, as the space is all too cranked up.

Knowing how dedicated and shared web hosting services work, you would do well to choose one based on what your needs are. It may just be possible that you could end up choosing dedicated services instead of the shared ones, because they fit your needs.

You can get cheap and best web hosting deals at Hostgator. Get more information HERE



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