Web Hosting Plan FAQ
There are many web hosting companies present, each and every company providing their own web-hosting plan. You can find a web-hosting plan that offers all the features that you want at an affordable price. All you have to do is to search and come up with the best business web hosting for your professional web site.
Here are the top 7 questions that you should think of before choosing a web hosting plan.
1. How much space do I need in a web hosting plan?
This would all depend on the kind of website you have. For example, if you have a multimedia rich site (the kind that contains flash, audio downloads, etc), a much larger hosting plan, providing a bigger hosting space, would thus be needed. However, should your website only contain purely words and some pictures, a basic hosting plan would suffice.
2. How much bandwidth do I need in a web hosting plan?
For the uninformed, bandwidth is defined as the amount of data that can be sent from one computer to another through a particular connection in a certain amount of time. Hence to answer how much bandwidth do you need, this would be dependant on the number of traffic (visitors) you have targeted for your site.
3. What server should I host on in a web hosting plan?
This would depend on your preference and what language your site is being built with. Generally, a Windows hosting plan is preferred, as it is easy to develop and also provides free source codes. Unlike Linux and Unix hosting (which only supports CGI, PHP), a Windows hosting plan supports most of the languages used to develop a website. Thus you would not need to worry about switching hosting providers, should you decide to revamp your site in another development language.
4. Shared Hosting? Dedicated Server Hosting? Which one?
Dedicated hosting would be apt only if you are from a large corporate website, gaining many visitors a day, selling a huge range of products online, etc. However, if you are just a small or an average business, a Shared Hosting plan would more than suffice your needs. A Shared Hosting is when many individual websites are located on the same server. Most email/web hosting are Shared.
5. What Other Requirements do I Need in a web hosting plan?
We believe that all sites have different requirements, ‘To Each it's Own'. There is no ‘this is all you need' package. It would be good to make a list of features that you require, ranging from important to not so important. This would be handy when choosing your provider.
Below are just some guidelines (to name a few):
- FrontPage support
- POP3 email
- Control Panel
- Web-based email
- Anti virus support
- Anti spam support
6. Who provides hosting?
Hosting is provided by a large number of providers; namely local ISPs, Resellers and the most reliable of all, the Professional Hosting Companies.
We strongly recommend hosting your site with a Professional Hosting Company, as they are the specialist in this field and would be able to provide you with timely and the best support.
There are however many hosting companies. One must hence thoroughly check out a few, before settling on one. Be very cautious about a company offering, cheap web hosting, as it may just turn out to be the most expensive one, causing you to lose money over downtime, and giving you non-existent support.
7. How do I Evaluate Hosting Providers?
The checklist
- Technical support/Customer Service
Call in and talk to them before purchasing. How efficient are they? How long do you have to wait until they attend to you? Does it meet your standards?
100% uptime claim, is usually a scam. This is because scheduled maintenance and upgrading, to keep their servers in good condition, would mean that there would be some downtime.
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