Not having a website could put a business out of its profit run, having one is very important nevertheless. Not everyone has necessary expertise to build a website; but even if a professional is to do the whole job – every direct or indirect newcomer to the web industry should know some in-depth stories.
1. Get to know Web Hosting
Before you get into web hosting, knowing the definition is a crucial pre-requisite. Put briefly, web hosting is a storage space with various technological functionalities that can store website contents and show them as a webpage whenever a visitor requests the website on their website browsers. The setup is huge and very costly, most people go for convenient third party web hosting companies who rent their facilities for a specific amount of monthly charge.
2. Know the Types
Web hosting might be a single term, but it has classifications in terms of cost, performance, security, features, additional features, required skills, control options etc. Hosting servers could cost from as cheap as $1.5 per month to as high as few hundreds per month; depending on what type of hosting has been purchased.
3. Shared Hosting Plans
Shared website hosting plans are currently the most popular type of web hosting;because they are cheap and easily available on almost all hosting company’s offerings. On shared hosting servers, multiple websites would be using a computer system to store files, scripts and codes etc. The system speed may get lower as many users share one system.
4. VPS – Virtual Private Servers
Virtual Private Servers are private servers in literal meaning, but the server they are hosted on are shared with other users. Shared hosting servers won’t offer highly advanced features like splitting the available hard drive space into two or three different hosting spaces but it’s doable on VPS servers. VPS offers advanced flexibility in web hosting.
5. Dedicated Server Hosting
Websites with higher incoming and outgoing traffic and requirement for extreme computing and calculations should be hosted on a dedicated web server. Dedicated web servers are servers that only host one website, reserves the whole bandwidth for that one website only and every incoming and outgoing connection would be reserved only for one user; no sharing takes place so far.
6. Cloud Hosting
Cloud hosting is based on the cloud storage principal. The website wouldn’t be hosted on a specific web server located on some specific place on earth. Instead, the mirror copy of the website would be hosted on all cloud servers of the web hosting company; and whenever some visitor types in the address the website files would be drawn from the closest server.
7. Managed WordPress Hosting
Managed WordPress hosting is basically a type of shared web hosting service. Instead of purchasing a shared web hosting service and manually setting it up to run a WordPress pressed blog or website, some website hosting companies offer a pre-installed WordPress setup with all necessary modifications. Less workaround, easier blogging!
8. Bandwidth and FTP
Each web hosting service offers a specific amount of file transfer allowance, known as bandwidth. Websites can’t exceed that limit for uninterrupted transmission of the website. Assessing the required monthly bandwidth is very important. FTP refers to file transfer protocol; which indicates a technology to share file between servers or computers over internet. Having this feature on a web hosting is a plus.
9. Ask your Hosting Vendor Questions
To find the perfect web hosting service for your website, you need to make everything clear with your web hosting provider and there’s no alternate to direct communication between you and some of their marketing people. You should focus on the data storage, bandwidth, domain registration, expiry dates, renewal and transfer processes, customer service etc.
10. Say not to cheap hosting!
Inexpensive services usually draw attention. But in this case, say a big NO to almost-free web hosting services. These services usually end up in Error 404 all year long, no customer would ever trust a company with a malfunctioning website.
Conclusion
These tips should be the checklist before buying a web hosting service. Experts could also offer some great help.
Santosh Kumar is a Professional SEO and Blogger, With the help of this blog he is trying to share top 10 lists, facts, entertainment news from India and all around the world.