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Article : Provide A Good Home For Your Website
by Terry McDermott
Selecting a web hosting company is like sending one
of your children off to college. You may have
complete confidence in your son or daughter’s
abilities but unless they are placed in the proper
environment they will not have the opportunity to
thrive. Likewise, no matter how sophisticated or
impressive the website you have designed may be, if
you do not place the site where it can perform
optimally you will likely be disappointed in the
results.
Selecting web hosting is not simply finding a place
where your website can reside. It is finding the
company that offers the resources that will allow
your website to operate effectively and to grow as
the business or public demands. This means that you
must be able to store and transfer enough data so
that your site functions smoothly but also remains
affordable.
Free web hosting services normally require that you
allow ads to be placed on your site. These generate
revenue for the hosting company by enabling them to
display ads to visitors to your website. Only you
can determine if the ads are appropriate for
visitors to your site. In addition you will have to
decide if the amount of storage and the available
bandwidth will be sufficient for the type of website
that you want to display. A free service may be
completely appropriate for a personal website that
is periodically modified. But trying to operate a
site with significant traffic or a commercial focus
may be “penny wise and pound foolish.”
All commercial web hosting companies are not created
equal. Of course, cost is an issue but reliability
and service will likely be major factors in the
decision making process. You should expect your host
to be up and functioning 100% of the time but you
will likely only see guarantees of 99-99.5% uptime.
Less than this is unacceptable.
If you will personally be managing much of the
activity for your site, make sure that you are
comfortable with the Control Panel. Some hosts
present Control Panels that are cumbersome and
complicated. You want to easily navigate through
routine functions. You will also want to make sure
that the hosting company has functionality that you
may not be using now but will likely use in the
future. These would include PHP, MySQL, SSI, .htaccess,
SSL, etc. Examine the offers for email and
autoresponders also.
Many web hosting services offer very low rates if
you commit to a year or more of hosting. While this
may turn out to be an excellent value in the long
term, it may be advisable to pay each month until
you are confident in the service and, quite
importantly, the quality of the technical support
that they provide. Getting accurate responses to
questions quickly will make your life as a webmaster
less stressful.
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