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Some have argued that one of the most crucial elements of online success is the hosting of a website. This argument is based on the simple premise, that if you are going to spend huge amounts of money on a website through marketing and maintaining then the site should be available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. As such if your website availability is limited through customer request, then it could be costing you money and driving potential customers away.
If you are an owner of a website, choosing the right hosting company is of paramount significance. This is due to the fact that poor hosting organisations can cost their customers to lose money as well as reputations online. The correct host can make your website even more effective online just by offering a few key features. With everyone claiming to be the best how can one choose the correct Hosting company?
There are some fundamental features to consider when choosing a Host and the type of package that you require. These are usually easy to understand and as such most companies tend to offer these. However what separates most companies is the additional features included in the hosting package. Here is an outline of some of these:
Free Hosting:
Free hosting is offered by numerous companies and is ideal for personal home pages. In addition it allows you to get your own internet space without it costing you. Usually this is of interest to people who do not run a business online but merely have a website that has been created as a hobby. However there are a number of limitations if you are a business and decide to attain free hosts, they usually offer no guarantee of site uptime and you have few or no additional features.
If you plan to make money with your web site however you need to forget the idea of a free host. Immediately you create a credibility problem with your visitors that you will not be able to overcome in most cases.
Choosing The Right Host:
How significant is choosing the right web-host? After all they maintain access to your site 24/7, If your site goes down so does your chance of making any transactions. When choosing an organisation there is a requirement that you choose a company that is reliable and that monitor their servers 24 hours a day, 7 days a week so that they are instantly alerted if their is a possible problem. Ensure access to technical support is available 24/7.
Once the confirmation of the above is achieved then the additional features need be contemplated.
Basic Features:
There are certain features that apply to all hosting packages; these are usually straight forward and easy to understand.
Disk Space: Decide how big a website you'll need, disk space is sold in chunks of MB (mega bytes). Packages usually start from around 5 MB and range all the way up to 300 + MB. The amount of space you need is governed mostly by the number of images/graphics you'll have on the site. Text by itself takes up little room.
E-mail accounts: This is one of the traps hosting companies implement to net extra profits. Make sure you have enough e-mail addresses when you get started, and find out in advance how much extra you'll be charged if you need more.
Additional Features:
There are numerous other features you may or may not require from a web host, the following is just a simple list. Decide which you require and then use it as a checklist when choosing a hosting company:
- Mailing Lists
- Shopping cart
- Unlimited Aliasing
- Unlimited Responders
- Unlimited Forwarding
- Web Site Statistics
- PGP / PGP Mail
- FrontPage Extensions
- 24/7 Support
- Site Search Engine
- Daily Backups
- Hit Counter
- Unlimited Bandwidth
- Your Own CGI-BIN
- Anonymous
- FTP Directory
- Protection Archive Manager PHP / MySQL
- Unlimited FTP Access
- RealAudio & Video
- File Manager
- SSL-Secure Server
- Customized Error messages
- Server Side Include
- Redirect URL
- Site Creation Tool
- E-mail Accounts
- Form Mail
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