Web Hosting Service
A journey in the search for a website hosting service should start with the consideration of a service to fit your present and future marketing needs. The hosting companies customer service department should have the insight to recommend the appropriate service to the potential customer looking for the best fit.
You can learn more about the hosting options you have, even though you might consider yourself not technically inclined. Below you will find the most important factors to consider when choosing a hosting account for your website.
The big question is making the decision to select a web hosting service package that is the best fit for your business. This article will describe in detail the plans available that you can make an intelligent choice based on your specific needs.
Outlined here is what you Should focus on and prioritize the most important features, eliminate the unnecessary aspects that will not help your specific hosting needs situation to make an intelligent choice on which Web Hosting Service to use.
The emphasis will also be on questions that should be asked when shopping for your domain or websites most appropriate plan suitable specifically to your requirements.
Domain Name
Before embarking on your quest for the hosting best suited for you, be prepared with a domain name that you have already chosen. If you already have a domain name then make preparations to do a backup and transfer to your new chosen provider.
Data Center
Most providers will have features to seamlessly make the transfer to their servers, but it’s always a good idea to make sure you have a backup separately in case things go awry. The host server machines are located in what’s called a data center.
They should have servers positioned in various data centers around the globe to give subscribers visitors fast access to their site irrespective of their location in the world.
Some Web hosts are able to provide a colocation in different countries which is connectivity and data center space to the Internet for other servers located in their data center.
A committed web hosting service colocation web hosting is where the user owns the colo server for the colocation.
It is then the responsibility of the hosting company to provide location space for the server, and maintains the colocation server.
Cloud Hosting
Regular Cloud hosting plans average around $15 per month and usually provides a wide range of services, including e-commerce feature stack, name registration for your domain with, Office 365 tools and solutions with built in e-commerce marketing programs.
Flexible cloud computing features is where cloud hosting derives its power by seamlessly integrating with the critical needs of a growing business into a cloud infrastructure where space and hosting services can be upgraded and expanded to your specific business needs.
Look out for provisions that can address Power outages and natural disasters that can be efficiently averted on cloud hosted sites minimizing or eliminating the problem due to the nature of configuration and decentralization flexibility of cloud hosting to safeguard your data.
Cloud website hosting enables providers to adjust users profiles to maximize the frequently used tools allowing cloud hosting usage fees to be applied as assets used by the consumer, rather than a flat charge for the generic cloud hosting resources the user will never use.
You can not anticipate the choice of the best hosting plan without first knowing what your specific needs are presently and foreseeable future. Cloud hosting plans give the flexibility to test the waters on the best way to go, with the choice to upgrade or downgrade as needed.
Virtual Machines
Virtual Server can also facilitate the need to cautiously recollect present and future internet site traffic requirements, server storage space, additional domains, frequency of updates and any other essential factors needed to make your site run efficiently.
If these kinds of questions appear overwhelming, or you don’t know the answers, then the best advice is to start with a dependable, shared hosting account.
A shared web hosting plan is cheap, easy to preserve, and sufficient for most new websites. Plus, you can always upgrade to VPS or committed hosting at a later time, as your internet site requirements evolve.
Many resellers offer nearly identical features to their provider shared hosting plan and facilitate the technical support in house usually via their live chat interface.
Uptime
Provider service uptime ought to be investigated in the event of a catastrophic occurrence with the provider causing your website going down or some other issue internally with the provider. Uptime refers to the time that a subscribers site is reachable and available as a percentage of a calendar year on the internet.
Uptime for a computer server hardware is a different metric. The service provider should have backup hardware to minimize any downtime due to hardware failure.
Prospective internet hosts should invest in their resources to ensure service is up and available 24 hours a day, 7 days every week. As a standard you should be looking for a 95% or above as your prospective provider enterprise uptime score with no exceptions.
Scalability
Add-on domains in recent times are common and companies usually have multiple domains under their main flagship domain. To host additional domains, you’ll want an extra website hosting area that’s able to scale up at a moments notice. Because of this it’s very important to have a web hosting account that permits for the addition of multiple domains.
Internet site visitors necessities can be attributed to your nicely optimized WordPress blog. Typically, a shared website hosting account must be enough to help 30 to 40 thousand visitors per month. In case you expect your website to grow considerably in the next few years, then choose an internet host to be able to accommodate your expansion.
The longer term growth could require upgrading from shared internet hosting to VPS or devoted server to deliver additional processing electric power, memory ability, disk storage, and better safety.
Cron job Scripts are needed for everyday functioning. Automatic Script Installations similar to Simple Scripts, Fantastico or Quick Installer saves time in getting your tools properly configured.
Customer support for the .htaccess configuration for security, page redirects and application or plugin deployment are essential to the maintenance of your web hosting.
If you are building a static site, then Server Side Includes (SSI) would be needed for easier site maintenance, File Transfer Protocol (FTP) accessibility to facilitate easy file transfer.
E-commerce marketing
is becoming the most popular web application method of marketing online today and is sure to be a dominating factor of the future.
Therefore, your hosting provider has to be equipped with tools that are able to do transaction processing on your website with all the shopping cart attributes
Back-ups are extremely important to safeguard your work and needs to be one of the major features provided by your website hosting provider. They should also have the capability to perform regular backups and be able to restore your website at a moment’s notice.
You need to know what questions to ask relating to back up requirements you first need to have an understanding on how back-ups work.
Three major questions to ask your potential website host are one are the full backups performed regularly, two would you be able to do the backups yourself easily using the cPanel and three would you be able to manually do the restoration of your data without having to contact their technical support staff.
Control Panel
If the hosting provider does not provide root access to an easy-to-use control panel then you will be totally dependent on their technical customer support for even the most remedial tasks. Good customer service is essential for non-technical tacks like billing plan and customer service support to assist in planning your website implementation.
A control panel or popularly known as a cPanel hands the keys to you to control the major functions of your hosting with a web content management system which is essential for the growth of your website because you know specifically what your needs are. The customer service should be on a short turn around time to any submitted trouble tickets.
Tech support should only be reserved for the more complicated configuration tasks and customer service should coordinate the call on what would be best handled by the hosting company. A knowledge base should readily be available as a reference for the first step for any customer support troubleshooting process.
Most hosting companies use Open Source Linux as the Operating System of choice including Apache, SQL Server, PHP Perl and Python. It has been proven to be a stable system that offers the most power when configured on hosting servers.
Other systems are offered, but it would be prudent to select a package that is Linux configured.
Virtual Private Server
A virtual private server (VPS) is a more expensive package that separates server tasks into web based servers, where web assets can be distributed evenly taking the load off server hardware. This type of subscription will only be needed if your website starts to get a significant increase in traffic and volume.
