How to select a good web host?

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After you have registered your domain name you have to select a webhosting company which will publish your website on the internet. Again I strongly encourage you to register your own domain name with paid hosting rather than with free hosting. When you use free hosts, you’re just like squatting on someone else’s property. It’s just like telling people that you’re not serious with your business. Your pages will also be limited and you won’t be able to add more function to your website. Your website will also be flooded with annoying banner and advertisement and this will distract your visitor’s attention from your product or services. Furthermore their supports are normally poor since they are providing their service to you for free.

A paid web hosts will provide you with space for your web pages, tools and support mostly 24/7. There are various packages offered and the price will also varies. There are no reason to pay a lot for web hosting if you have a small and medium size business. The price can be around $7 per month and they already can offer you with reasonable package to start your online business. As you can see they are value for your money and most of them also offer free website builder for beginner especially if you don’t know anything about html.

Below are some tips that you should consider when you’re planning to decide on which web hosting plan that is suitable to support your business:

• 24 hours/day and 7 days/week technical support - before you decided to choose a web host, try to email them. See how fast will they respond to your email

• Storage space of at least 200MB - To start a small business, 30MB is sufficient enough but if you’re planning to expand your business in the future you’ll need more space.

• Data transfer/Bandwidth of at least 2GB per month - This is for a website which receive less than 1000 visitors. You can always upgrade or change your hosting plan when required.

• You can use your own domain name - multiple domain or subdomain with only one account.

• POP3 email provided - This is to ensure you can use your own email address such as yourname@yourwebsite.com. Indirectly by using your own email address you’ll look more professional.

• Additional software support - look for a web hoster which could provide additional free software that can help you with your business such as autoresponder, forwarder and etc.

• Stable server - make sure that the web host could provide an uptime of at least 99.7%. If the server goes offline, your website will also goes down. Your business will also be affected. For example if a web host could only provide an uptime of 96% and there are 720 hours in a month. If the server goes down, 4% downtime equivalent to 28.8 hours. This is more than a day and if you have a website that could sell your products for at least 3 times a day, this will be a great lost don’t you think.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, July 15th, 2006 at 10:46 pm and is filed under Web Hosting, How to start?. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.