Your first foray into web hosting will always be a bit of a shock. The acronyms alone are enough to get most people. But with a little per...
Your first foray into web hosting will always be a bit of a shock. The acronyms alone are enough to get most people. But with a little perseverance you can come away from your experience with a good web host for your site. So,
what should you look for when looking into web hosting?
Bandwidth and Storage Space
One of the most important things about any web host is how much bandwidth is available. Bandwidth is what lets high numbers of people visit and view your site. When you max out your allotted bandwidth, your site might as well not exist.
If you have content that could possibly explode in popularity, like you hope it will, then you could max out your bandwidth at the absolutely worst time. This happens pretty much without fail, and it happens because you quickly use all your allotted bandwidth for a month in a few hours. Then you have to arrange to have more data provided, usually bumping you up to a more expensive plan.
Storage space is also very important, though it's usually not as tight a commodity as bandwidth. You probably won't need to use half the space provided by any plan, unless you happen to be focusing on photo or movie storage.
Great Uptime
It doesn't matter how great the bandwidth allotment is if your site doesn't stay up often enough for people to look at it.
When looking into web hosting, uptime is easily one of the most important things to look for. Think about how annoyed you are when you go to a site that is down. It's frustrating. A slow or often down website will drive your viewers away.
All sites do have downtime. The trick is to find a host who has scheduled downtime for server maintenance rather than one whose services go down while not scheduled.
Scripting Language Support
Okay, so this one is a bit advanced, but no less important. Most modern sites will be doing things behind the scenes, running things on the server to compliment the code running on the web browser's machine. In order to do this, you need to have a scripting language installed. While you’re probably covered if your web hosting company supports PHP, some pieces of website software require more exotic languages. Find out what languages the things you want to run are based on before making your decision.
Easy to Manage Database
Databases are an integral part of any modern website, whether it be a blog or a full-blown social network. Sites need somewhere to store their information, and databases are it.
Make sure that your host provides you with plenty of database space, and make sure that they provide an easy interface which you can use to interact with your data. You will appreciate a good interface when something does eventually go wrong with your site.
Choosing the Perfect Web Hosting Company for Your Needs
These are hardly all of the things to keep in mind when shopping for web hosting, but it covers the basics for all users. You might want email under your URL, you might care about friendly customer support. The trick is to look for a service that fits you, one that is friendly and covers all the basics of web hosting.
