Webhosting

Web hosting services play a vital part in your website’s success. Without a web host you will not have any way to support your site on the Internet, so you must make sure that you choose a quality hosting account that provides a wide variety of features and services. Read the following suggestions of things you should look for in a quality web host. There are plenty other things to look for, these are just a few of the super important ones.

Suggestion #1 – Support

You want a web hosting service that provides support 24 hours per day, 7 days per week, 365 days per year. The reason for this is you need your website up and running at all times, allowing you to make sales. If your website is down it could be costing you a lot of money, not to mention visitors who cannot access your site. If you have a problem at 6 am Christmas Day, you want to be able to contact your web host support and have it taken care of. This is a sign of a good web hosting company. Also, don’t just take their word they offer support round the clock, give them a couple of test calls at off hours and weekends to see if they respond.

Suggestion #2 – Contact Information

You should have all the important contact information for your web host. If this information is not available then you’ll most likely have problems in the long run. If they cannot give you a way to contact them when you have a problem or need help then you may have to wait days before you get your problems resolved. This is unacceptable. If contact information is not listed online keep looking for hosts.

Suggestion #3 – Free Will Cost You

If you are developing a website for business purposes, make sure you buy your own URL and get real website support that you pay for. If you use free web hosts, you will cost yourself money because customers will not take your site seriously as the impression will be that you don’t either.

Suggestion #4 – E-mail

Make sure your web host supports e-mail and allows multiple addresses. You will need this in your business so you certainly want a server that supports this. If not, find another host because most good web hosts allow for e-mail addresses.

Suggestion #5 – Server Space and Bandwidth

You want to be sure your web host has adequate server space so your website has plenty of room to grow. Bandwidth is also important because the more bandwidth the host has, the faster your page loads, which in turn means more customers that will actually make it to your site because it opened quickly.

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Once you have your company’s web site up and running, it is vital that you do everything possible to keep it that way. Nothing sets off alarms in a customer’s head faster than a non accessible web site or one that has features which do not work. A web site is literally your company’s window to the world and every aspect of the site; including the design, content, accessibility, ease of navigation, and uptime, says a lot about your company.

A fully functioning, attractively designed, feature-loaded web site spells professionalism and expertise, while a poorly designed and inaccessible site reflects very poorly on your business. Still, the best designed site on the web; one loaded with impressive features and clever design tricks means absolutely nothing if your customers can’t get to it because it is down. Unfortunately, if your site is hosted by some other company and resides on their servers, downtime may be largely out of your control. When your host’s servers go down, your site goes down and there’s not a thing you can do about it. There are a few things you can do, however, to ensure that your site stays up as long as possible.

Choosing Your Web Host

There are thousands of low cost web hosting services out there and they are all offering a thousand different deals for web hosting. Choosing the right one can be a daunting task, especially if you don’t know a lot about internet hosting and what you should be getting for your money. There are a few things you should look for in a web host ? some of which will help you get the best deal and others which will help you determine whether you should expect to have a problem with downtime.

To cover the business end of web hosting, find out how much bandwidth and storage space you get for your monthly fee. Bandwidth is especially important because the more popular your site becomes the more visitors it will have and the more bandwidth it will use. If you are using too much bandwidth, two things will happen. You’ll be charged for anything over the amount you’re contracted for and the site could easily experience downtime due to receiving more traffic than it can handle.

You will also want to look at the host’s server information. Most web hosting services will post the specifications of their web servers on their own web sites. This allows customers to get a good idea of the host’s stability. If you don’t understand the technical jargon that these informational pages contain, get someone from your own IT department to look at with you. They’ll be able to tell if it looks like the host has a stable server system.

Check Your Site

To help ensure stability, you should check the site yourself (or make sure someone in your company is checking it) several times per day. This is the best way to make sure that everything is in working order and to resolve problems that do occur as quickly as possible. If you find that the site is down, a quick call to the host can often resolve any issues or at least let you know if there’s a problem with just your site or their entire server.

John Michaels is a freelance author for WebHostPacks.com where he regularly publishes articles on how to find a cheap web host and reviews of low cost web hosting services.

Choosing a host or switching hosts can be an agonizing experience. There are so many choices and price structures.

You see the service level guarantees you want, but there is no way to ensure the Host’s promised service level will be kept. Sadly, past experience tells you all too often the service promises are unfulfilled.

Experience tells you to steer clear of so called “cheap” hosts, just to save $4 a month but risk huge headaches when your site goes down and no one answers the phone (or you get a “wrong number” response!).

(more tips at http://web-hosting.maxsvr.com)

Choose a host that has a starter package in the $6-$8 per month range and at least 1 GB of storage. Any Bandwidth over 30 GB per month is usually more than enough, if it isn’t you should look at the next level of packages the hosts offer. Check how long they have been in business and make sure it is at least more than one year.

Check web host reviews on several such sites and look at detailed comments. (more tips at http://web-hosting.maxsvr.com)

To get real independent feedback on host providers, email several webmasters of smaller but popular sites and ask which host they prefer and why.

Once you have found a host provider that has the right price, has been around long enough, and gets good references go to their link at http://web-hosting.maxsvr.com and place your order.

Location of Provider – I don’t think you should worry whether the provider is in your state, or if you live in another country (I live in Canada) that the provider is in your country. There is no real advantage, especially with the top tier hosts that have 24/7 customer service.

There are often disadvantages to using local providers in some regions. Their cost is often much higher and their physical internet location may result in slower delivery to most internet users, except you! (Try the “internet speed test” at toast.net and check your speed to a host and ask friend in the country where most of your traffic comes from to test their connection to the same host).

(more tips at http://web-hosting.maxsvr.com)

Lunarpages and Powweb are selections available at Toast.net and are on the top 5 provider list at http://web-hosting.maxsvr.com.

Kevin Taylor is a freelance writer/webmaster living in Toronto, Canada. http://web-hosting.maxsvr.com

1. The reputation of the web hosting company.

Most web hosting companies on the web have been in existence for at least 2 years and they are usually handled by experience and IT savvy network engineers who can provide the necessary support and services to their customers. However, there are also several “mom and pop” set ups out there which are handled by amateurs who are greedy to make plenty of your own money without even knowing how to do something as fundamental as setting up your user account. Be sure to check the credentials of the web hosting firm by either reading their about us or the technology they use for their server farm. Make sure you pick a company that has been around for at the very least 2 years and have a successful track record with 95% up time for all its servers. That’s a reasonable expectation as 100% is not a realistic aim in the computing world.

2. How much of storage space are you given?

Most web companies out the offer space that range from as small as 20 MB to as big as 2GB or even more. However, this depends largely upon you the user. Make sure you do not get sold into buying more space then you need. This is a common trend amongst novice web owners who tend to feel that the bigger space the better and the more powerful their website can be. That is the most contorted statement I have ever heard in my 5 years as a IT expert and internet marketing consultant. Personally, I would recommend you to use Host4profit as your hosting company because I find that they provide the most innovative packages that even reward you by paying you to be a member & in many other ways too one of which includes a trip to the Bahamas. Find out more at my website at: http://www.neptune500.com simply click the blue button on your left which is animated when you get there.

3. What is the available bandwidth space for you to transfer data each month?

We all need to transfer data to our website and update its content often in order to stay afresh and also to keep our ratings high up on the search engines right? Well all web hosting companies offer a certain bandwidth or “transfer window” if you will to enable you transport your data from your local computer hard disk drive to your web server. However this transfer window has a limited space. This is set to prevent the servers on their side from having a bandwidth overload from users repeatedly transferring large amounts of data to and fro without any limits being set. A bandwidth space is allocated to enable you to manage the amount data that you want to transfer each month into the storage space allocated. Note that the data you transfer is constantly kept track of until you have reach the transfer limit for that month. Most web hosting companies tend to be stingy on this so as to provide so called “high speed data transfer” to their clients. They usually cap this bandwidth off at 1GB. Host4profit however offers its client a 3GB bandwidth per month. Can you see why everybody is switching to Host4profit now?

4. The support provided both online and offline to ensure you can sleep soundly at night.

This is the area that is overlooked most often whenever the novice webmaster signs up for a webhosting contract. It is absolutely important ( burn this into your head) I repeat absolutely important to ensure that you get a web hosting company that will answer your calls and ensure your website stays up and running even if you call them at 2 am in the morning to request for help. I am talking about 24 hours support everyday of the week and also relevant safety measures implemented in the data center at which your server resides. I highly recommend you find out more about the location of the data center about the power supply facilities, where it is situated and also the safety measures that have been put in place such as fire protection and relevant data backup facilities to a remote location as a safety should a physical destruction occur that literally wipes out the whole data center ( although I think this is highly unlikely unless George Lucas must have been tingling with the wrong button at his huge animation studios and manage to bring Darth Vader back to life).

Arvind Gawade is a fully certified IT expert/consultant. He holds a Diploma in Information Technology specializing in Network Engineering. He is also an internet marketing expert that has been providing marketing services on the web for the past 2 years. Arvind and his team will train you to become an internet expert within a year for free and also build a free website for you within 24 hours. Visit his site for more info at: http://www.neptune500.com