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Advice to Webmasters Who Want to Get the Best Hosting |
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Written by Bethany Payne
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Friday, 30 October 2009 08:29 |
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Technical support is a huge and important part of your hosting experience. Having a site hosting always brings up problems, whether you are new to the company or just are trying new things with your site. Therefore, you want a hosting company that will solve your issues quickly. For the most difficult problems, you will need to be able to reach technical support any time of night or day. For the easiest, you will want your company to offer an online "knowledge base." In the middle, chat, email and a ticket support system should also be available.
by BethanyPayne
Technical support is a huge and important part of your hosting experience. Having a site hosting always brings up problems, whether you are new to the company or just are trying new things with your site. Therefore, you want a hosting company that will solve your issues quickly. For the most difficult problems, you will need to be able to reach technical support any time of night or day. For the easiest, you will want your company to offer an online "knowledge base." In the middle, chat, email and a ticket support system should also be available.
Let's talk about uptime. Uptime is the percentage of time your site is "up" or available to viewing by your visitors. The best hosting companies will give you a guarantee for an uptime of 99% or higher. This means that they have a history of meeting this standard and feel comfortable offering the guarantee. Be aware, however, that if your site is down more that it should be, they will not usually compensate you for lost sales or traffic. They will only give you a chunk of your monthly fee back on a prorated basis.
Other important factors to look at when choosing a hosting company are number of sites you may host, bandwidth and disk space. The best hosting companies are now offering "unlimited" for all of these items. The number of sites or domains you may host used to be just one per account, in the old days. Now you may host an unlimited number of sites with most hosting companies. Fun, fun, fun. The second factor, bandwidth, is the amount of traffic between your site and the internet. Say your site was mentioned on an important newscast and a ton of traffic was sent to you. You would need a lot of bandwidth in that situation. The final factor is disk space and is now usually unlimited at most hosting companies. Disk space is the amount of memory used by all of your files, photos and videos. Note that although hosting companies claim to offer you "unlimited" amounts, if you are going to need a sudden large increase in any of these factors, you should contact your hosting company beforehand. They may be able to charge you in that situation.
Price is another factor to evaluate. You, like everyone, want the best price you can get. But we've all learned that you get what you pay for. My advice with regard to hosting cost is to try to get a good price, but know that really cheap hosting does not make up for a lack of good support and services. Be aware that there are free web hosting companies, often requiring you to put up with advertising. There are some free web hosting sites that do not have advertising, but know that free web hosting services disappear frequently. In my opinion, free hosting is not worth the hassle of moving your website to a new company every couple of months.
Carefully picking a hosting company is rewarded many times over. Your site may be up for years and grow and change over that time. Having hosting that can keep up with you is worth the time, money and effort that goes into researching and picking the right company.
About the Author:
Looking to find the best deal on web hosting, then visit www.askgeekgirl.com to find excellent web hosting reviews for you, and her top 2 recommended hosting companies. |
