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Choosing a web host is a lot like choosing anything else in life. You do your research, compare the options, decide which is best, and hope it lives up to your expectations. Finding the best website hosting company is a critical step on the path to getting a website up and running, and it should be approached with care. The details of web hosting are highly technical, and in general the layperson need only know the basics to be able to make a decision about which website hosting company to go with. 
A web host is a company that supplies server space for their clients’ use, in addition to providing constant Internet connectivity. Website hosting services are the vehicle for your website, the means by which the world is able to access information about your company, so its proper management and function is very important.
Search Engine Listings and Traffic Benefits from SEO
When looking for a website host, the first step should be to consider the needs of your company; whether you need managed or unmanaged hosting, whether your site will need a great deal of server space, and the amount of bandwidth you’d like for your site are all factors in the web hosting decision. Customer service is another, often overlooked, element of web hosting; many companies unsatisfied with their web hosts complain that customer service wasn’t available when they most needed the help. Look for a company that has 24/7 customer care, with actual humans that you can talk to, rather than automated services.
Try to find a site with a very high percentage of uptime, preferably 99.9%. While 100% uptime is just not possible, getting very close is absolutely necessary if you want your site to perform well. Not only does downtime prevent customers from accessing your site, it also prevents spiders from crawling the site, which can hurt your search engine rankings if it happens too often.
Consider the price of each company you look into. Price should not be the sole deciding factor, because when it comes to web hosting, cheap doesn’t necessarily mean low quality, and expensive doesn’t necessarily mean superior quality. Price is only important because your budget constraints will contribute to your choice. Lastly, when it comes to searching for a website hosting service, try to approach it as you would approach shopping around for any outsourced business function: Look for reviews from other clients. If you are able to find positive reviews about a website hosting company, chances are it’s reliable and worthy of your business.
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Most internet users take the technology for granted. Especially in a day and age when many children grow up with cell phones, profiles on Facebook, and constant access to the web, it’s hard to explain a time when we relied on post offices, ate at home and not out of paper bags, and telephones were (gasp!) connected to the wall by a cord. So yes, the internet is ubiquitous, but when the average user gets online and visits a webpage, he just expects it to pop up, no questions asked; he has no idea about the complicated transaction that just occurred, or how that webpage happened to be there in the first place. For the business owner or manager, though, that type of blissful ignorance just doesn’t cut it. Online website design is an important part of today’s businesses, simply because customers expect to be able to find anything and everything online.
If you’re in the middle of the process of getting your company website up and running, you probably have figured a little bit about online website design. However, you might be completely in the dark about how you’ll go about getting your site online. Luckily for you, there’s no need to take a college course in hosting a website, you merely need to get a general sense of the practice and choose which type of web hosting your company’s website will best be served by.
Here’s a very simplistic description of how web hosting works:
A server is an extremely powerful computer with a massive hard drive, or multiple hard drives. People or entities looking to create an online website “rent” space on that hard drive. Each server has a distinctive Internet Protocol (IP) address, and renters “live” under that address. One web hosting expert made an analogy to an apartment building; the server is the physical building, and has a street number as an address, and each site within that server is an apartment, which has an apartment number contained within that street address. When you make your foray into website design and hosting, your site will be “hosted” by this server.
There are many different types of web hosting, and they vary in price depending on the services each offers. Here are three of the most commonly utilised types of hosting:
Free web hosting: As the name suggests, this type of hosting is completely free, which may be nice for a personal use such as a family blog, but is not appropriate for a more complicated use such as an ecommerce site.
Shared hosting: In this hosting model, many sites share the same server. This is convenient for the hosting company, since it can provide low-cost hosting with low overhead.
Dedicated hosting: Dedicated hosting is suitable for larger websites that have more needs, such as unlimited databases and email. There are two types of dedicated hosting, managed and unmanaged. In managed hosting, the hosting company controls the server, whereas unmanaged hosting allows the user maximum control over the server. Unmanaged hosting is much more time-consuming and complicated for the user company. |
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Congratulations, so you now have a fantastic new website! Whether you have designed and built the website yourself or engaged the services of a professional web design company, your website will now need to be hosted by a web hosting company. There are a lot of web hosting and VPS hosting companies out there so how do you choose a suitable one? |
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