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Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Best web hosting

While the seasoned internet professional may be knowledgeable and experienced in web hosting, it is still something that can be a source of confusion to someone looking to get a web site online for the first time.

Web hosting, at its very simplest, is where someone takes the pages and files that make up your web site and they host them on a computer for you, in addition to providing everything that is needed for your site to be connected and found when someone directly references any of the site.

Getting hold of web hosting is incredibly easy for those wanting it, and an incredibly competitive business for those offering it. A lot of internet service providers (ISP's) will give you an allocation of free disk space with which you can host your own web site if you so wish. However, for anyone serious about their business this is usually not a good idea. There are often restrictions placed on space and bandwidth which will limit how successful your site can be before you have to move to paid hosting either with your ISP or another host. By hosting on your ISP's free web space you are also tying yourself into that ISP and this is likely going to cause problems should you decide to move to another ISP, as when you move you will lose the free web space. So, if you are serious about your business it makes sense to opt for paid hosting from a reputable hosting company from the start.

Free hosting is further restrictive on what it actually offers you, so if your site is going to need a database back-end, Java, PHP, .NET, or ASP, then chances are you are going to be out of luck!

Before choosing which company to use as your web host there are a number of factors that you need to check on. There is no point in moving to a web host where your web site is hardly ever up and running because the web host is having problems. Check what the claimed up-time is for the server that your web site is going to be hosted on. This information should be readily available from your potential web host. It is unrealistic to expect 100% up-time, but a figure of over 99% should definitely be expected. After all if you add it up just 0.1% downtime over a year would mean that your web site would be unreachable for almost 9 hours!

As well as up-time there are a number of other factors to consider before choosing which company to use as your web host. You need to ensure that the package they are offering meets your needs. Does it have enough disk space to meet your needs now and also to allow for growth over the coming months or years? Is the bandwidth sufficient? Bandwidth is the amount of data in bytes used transferring your files to a users browser when they request to see one of your web pages, but it can also include email traffic also. Make sure that you have enough for your needs, and again take into account the increase in traffic as your site becomes more popular.

Lastly, you must consider your software environment. Do you need Windows or Linux? What applications or databases will you need? Some are only available for one operating system or the other, so this may be the deciding factor on which OS you opt for. And of course there is price! There are a huge range of prices out there, but with the level of competition in the market I would suggest you get the basics that are outlined above sorted out first and then shop around to get it all at the best price.

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posted by surekha at 11:05 AM

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