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Guide to Choosing a Web Hosting Provider
Written by Daniel Longieliere
Provided by Logic Unlimited
Most small business owners have websites, and they all
at some point or another have to decide how, and who is going to host their
site. In the scheme of the website creation, development, optimization, and
product, hosting is not high up on the list, but it can end up being pretty
costly if you don’t follow a few simple guidelines.
Know your needs.
How big is your site? How many hits do you get, or expect to get? Not
understanding how much you need is a prime reason why customers allow themselves
to get over charged.
Stay away from the “Cheapo” webhosting offers.
Do a search on google, you can find a hundred web hosting companies out there
offering 2-10 dollars a month webhosting. Understand that in Technology, perhaps
more so than anywhere else you get what you pay for. If you just spent 700
dollars developing a beautiful site, why would you risk its stability with a low
cost server? Most of those companies are doing one of two things. They are
either overloading their server to such an extreme that eventually it will
crash, and your site will be down, or they just don’t plan on being around for
very long, and all of a sudden you wont be able to get anyone on the phone, and
your emails will go unanswered. A normal small business site should expect to
pay around 20-40 a month for their hosting. They should choose a hosting
provider who is at least in this country, and at best, a local provider. They
should also run some tests on the server, and if you can, write some currently
hosted webmasters and see if you can get a reference from them. Understand that
your site being down is bad, REALLY bad. It means that a customer is trying to
buy from you, or find out about you, and can’t.
Test before you move.
Purchase a month of webhosting from the company you choose to go through, and
test it for a month. See how responsive it is, copy over your site, but do not
transfer the domain name until you are ready. Logic Unlimited Clients can use
our test domain name if you wish to test out email, pinging, run some uptime
watching programs etc. The moment you transfer your domain, you are locking
yourself into at very best 1 day of downtime if something goes wrong, so be sure
about your hosting provider, and be sure they can run your site properly.
Test their tech support.
The number one complaint I have heard about on the internet about hosting is
speed of technical support. I am not talking about hold times. If you have to
wait on hold for 20 minutes before you can get through and get your problem
resolved, no big deal. However, if you only have email support, and it takes
them two days to respond to your emails, then you have a big problem. Look for
companies offering 24/7 technical support PHONE numbers. Make sure they work
too, call in on occasion during that first month of testing to make sure these
guys actually pick up, and can actually assist you.
Email problems
You will find this problem is notorious with those cheapo hosting companies.
Their email systems fail often, and the worst, they are on blacklists. You will
find yourself unable to email people unless you are in their address book. This
is embarrassing for you, and unprofessional. Make sure your hosting server isn’t
blocked.
Conclusion
I know that most people don’t put much thought into their hosting, and hopefully
some of you will take heed in this article, and follow it. It will save you so
many headaches down the road as web hosting is one of the easiest ways to get
scammed in regards to your online presence.
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