I constantly encounter people that want me to design or update a website for them, and they are already signed up with a hosting company. The only problem is that many of these people should never have signed up with that particular hosting company. I'm dealing with a client now who is paying almost two and a half times more a month than she should, and the service the hosting company provides is substandard.
I run into many problems with hosting companies, including:
The features offered by web hosts vary widely, as do their costs. Following are the minimum features a decent hosting company should offer, in my opinion.
Avoid Free Hosting like the plague. These hosts don't charge a monthly fee, but they do put ads on your site. These ads may run across the top, the side or pop-up anywhere on the screen. People find these ads annoying and distracting. Using a free hosting service will put many people off and you will lose visitors. Customers will also be more reluctant to buy any products or services from you. Would you buy something from a business that couldn't afford to pay $5-$10 a month for website hosting? It will also be more difficult for people to remember you web address. Instead of www.Acme.com, your web address may well be www.TheFreeSite.com/acme.html. And if the company goes out of business, then your site is gone and all the listings you have on search engines will no longer work.
Free sites may also change the rules about what you can have on your site. You may suddenly find that one or more of your pages are banned because of their content. I started out with free hosting years ago, but soon outgrew it and had to buy my own domain name, create a new website and start all over again getting my pages listed with search engines. When my free site was removed, all the links on search engines to that site no longer worked.
Avoid a hosting company that gives you Shared or Virtual Hosting. Shared hosting means that the server, the computer where your website resides, is shared with possibly hundreds of websites who all use the same server software. The hosting company gives you a certain amount of storage space on the server's hard drive for your site, and that hard drive stores as many sites as space allows. The problem is that since all the websites are sharing the same server software, if one website is attacked by a virus or hacker and the server software is damaged, then all the websites on that server will be affected the same way that single site is affected.
Look for a host that offers a Virtual Private Server. This means that your website resides in a partitioned section of the server and has its own server software. I've used Westhost for several years with no problems. They have great tech support and constantly improve the features they offer. You can find a banner link to them at the bottom of my page at http://www.creativecauldron.com/WebsiteDesign.shtml
To look for other web hosting services try these links.
As you check out web hosting services you will encounter some words that you may not have heard before. Here's some useful terminology that will clear things up for you.
Once you find a few place you like, check them out at the Better Business Bureau at http://bbb.org/ and do a search on Yahoo and Google to see if anyone has posted anything bad about them.
It can be difficult to know what to look for in a hosting company if you're new to the Internet. The best solution is to do a lot of research, talk to people you know who have websites and start trying different hosts who offer a 30-day money back guarantee. As long as you own your domain name, and you have created your own website, or had someone create it for you, then you will be fine. With these two things done, you can take your site to almost any host without any problems.
I Want A Website, But What Will It Cost? - Part 2
As I promised in last month's article, "I Want A Website. Now What Do I Do?" I'm going to talk about the cost of creating a website. Depending on what...Spam, The Stuff You Love To Hate
We all get spam, and we all hate it. I always thought it would be great if I could open some spam, press a button on my computer and have a zillion volts of electricity shoot through the phone lines all the way to the computer that sent the spam and turn it into a smoldering pile of metal and plastic.Painting The Canvas Of Your Website
There's more to selecting colors for your website than just choosing what you think is pretty. You also need to be aware of the psychology of color, and what's easy on your visitor's eyes.