What To Expect From A Web Hosting Company?
Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008I just wanted to leave one more quick post regarding web hosting. These are definitely a few things that you’ll want to look at when searching for a web hosting company.
1. Phone Support - Any major web hosting company is going to offer phone support and I wouldn’t host without it. Imagine your website goes down on a day when you have a press release coming out or some other major event where you expect a surge in website traffic. Now imagine that your website goes down and all you can do is send and email to support. It wouldn’t be a pleasant experience and phone support is a necessity. Don’t even consider a web host unless they have a posted phone number on their website.
2. Uptime Guarantee - Most hosting companies will offer something like “99.9% Uptime Guarantee”. This is something to look for as well, 99.9% is very good and really no one can guarantee 100% uptime. I’m sure some companies will claim 100% uptime but just be sure that they offer something very close to 99% uptime.
3. Monthly Commitments - I don’t really recommend paying for a year or so upfront. If you sign-up with a hosting company and find out that it doesn’t meet your needs you’re really not out anything. Granted, most offer a 30 day money back guarantee but why have to mess with billing or customer support when you can simply pay month to month. Once you’ve had a chance to host your website for a couple months you may consider committing for a year so that you don’t have the month to month billing plus you’ll find that you generally will save money by prepaying for a year but I don’t suggest signing up for a full year right off the bat.
4. Setup Fees - Unless your getting into a dedicated machine or something that requires custom configuration I would never recommend signing up with a web hosting that requires a setup fee. There are too many reputable web hosting companies that don’t charge a setup fee.
5. 30 Day Money Back Guarantee - What is it going to hurt to be able to try out a web host and know that you can get your money back if you’re not satisfied with their service or support. Again, there are too many reputable companies out there that offer 30 day money back guarantees out there to not choose one.
That’s it for this post, I’m going to leave one more post regarding web hosting and we’ll get into design & the rest of the basics.
Best regards,
David Lalumendre
www.WebsiteSpot.com
Web Hosting Solutions
Tuesday, April 1st, 2008Web hosting is like renting a storefront but instead of renting a brick & mortar store you are renting space on a web server. Once you’ve created the files that make up your website and pointed your domain names to your web hosting company you will publish the files to your web hosting account which makes it accessible to anyone who types in your domain name. One thing to point out is that your homepage will need to be named index.htm, index.html, default.asp, index.php among a few other options but never name your homepage something like hompage.htm or homepage.html or your site won’t be found properly. With that said, let’s get into some basic information regarding web hosting solutions.
1. Disk Space - This is the amount of space that you’ve ‘rented’. The amount of space that you need really depends on how much content you plan on publishing. The more pages, graphics, images, flash etc that you plan on publishing will require additional space. A decent amount of space for most websites is about 5GB. You’ll find some companies that offer some huge number like 1,000GB of space. Unless you plan on publishing a huge corporate site there really won’t be a need for that amount of space. That’s like buying a 500 horsepower car, yeah it’s nice to say but you’ll never need it.
2. Bandwidth / Data Transfer - This is the amount of data you are allowed to deliver from your site in a given month. Whenever someone visits your website data is transferred from your web hosting account to the monitor of the person visiting your website. This includes text, graphics, images, etc. The size of the images, the number of graphics, etc will determine the amount of data transfer so it’s always a good idea to use images that are lower resolution & limit the number of large size graphics on your website.
3. Email Accounts - This is going to be the number of personal email accounts are allowed to have in your web hosting plan. I would say that 5 email accounts would be a minimum for a new or personal website but these days most companies give you at least 100 so this won’t be an issue.
Email accounts within a hosting plan allow you to setup personal email accounts. For example, say you own TonysToys.com, you could setup sales@tonystoys.com, info@tonystoys.com, tony@tonystoys.com, etc. One last thing on email accounts, often times you’ll find that your email accounts are taken into account when determining disk space. For example, say you have 25mb of space left after you publish your website and you receive an email with a 1mb attachment via your email account, you would then only have 24mb left. Not every hosting company works this way but majority of them do.
4. Domains / Add-On Domains - This is a great option that really made it big with web hosting companies in the last couple of years. Add-On domains allows you to host more than 1 website on a single web hosting plan. This is a great way to save money because you don’t need to purchase a web hosting account for each domain name that you plan on building a website for. Just knowing that majority of my web sites are generally under a few GBs let’s me know that I can setup a few websites on any web hosting account that I setup that offers the capability of hosting multiple domains on 1 account.
That’s it for this post, in my next post I’m going to explain some of the additional features that you can expect with most web hosting plans such as databases, pre-installed software among other features.
Best regards,
David Lalumendre
www.WebsiteSpot.com
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