It is crucial to choose the right Web Host
Whether you're putting up an individual website or one for business use You must select your web hosting service wisely. The reason is that you will most definitely desire your site to be seen by the greatest possible number of users. It is crucial to consider some basic, but crucial factors that will increase the visibility of your website.
Points to consider when choosing web hosting
There are numerous web hosting companies and plans available. Each of them has their own unique strengths and drawbacks. How do you decide which one is the best?
Even after you've settled on a specific provider it is still necessary to select the right hosting plan that will suit you. Every web hosting site offer several different packages to choose from. The most sought-after package is the Unlimited Bandwidth.
These tips will help you to select a web hosting service.
1. Uptime of servers and customer support:
The ability of a website to be discovered online is contingent upon whether it is accessible from an internet-connected server. up and running at any time. This is referred to as Server uptime. The majority of web hosting companies advertise a 99.9 percent uptime for their servers. Some claim 100%.
You can look online for reviews from customers about the provider if you have time. You may also decide to go with more popular, established hosting providers that have an excellent reputation. Hosting companies that are reliable have backups and multiple servers. Some also promise 100%, and they fulfill it by guaranteeing to refund costs in the event of downtime occurs.
Support for customers is an additional element of a good web hosting. Customers must be able to contact them at any time via phone or internet. They must have a solid selection of FAQs and tutorials available on their site in case you require assistance. If you're serious about the design of your website, it is likely that you'll need contact support from your hosting provider more often than you imagine.
2. Pricing & included features
The variety of prices and features that are included in web hosting packages is pretty vast. You will want a fair balance of features and quality to meet your requirements. Cheaper products usually have lower quality than those more expensive. However, prices may be expensive without providing any added worth.
The prices of hosting packages typically depend on the set of features offered. This includes data storage and bandwidth limitations, amount of permitted addon subdomains and domains, amount of email accounts and FTP accounts hosted, shared or dedicated or virtual server plans programming languages, databases website tools, shopping cart etc., and the list of features goes on. The variety of options available can make it difficult to track down the various options, particularly if you do not know the meaning of these terms. But don't worry, we'll discuss the most essential options in the next paragraphs.
A reasonable-value shared hosting service typically costs between 6 and 8 US dollars each month. Virtual Private/Dedicated Servers are available for US$30-50 pm and dedicated servers between US60 to 60 dollars at AM.
Pricing tips – Some packages include the use of a domain for free along with hosting if you don't have the domain you want or need to purchase one. These packages can be very inexpensive.
3. Data Storage and Bandwidth limits
If you're new to putting up websites, you may have very little idea about how much data storage space and bandwidth your website will require. This isn't something you should worry about. Even the most experienced people will tell you that they do. Since your requirements will increase with the increase in visitors to your site increases, you will know all about it as you go.
Data Storage Space: Unless you intend to host lots of video/movie clips or a gigantic number of high-resolution images the majority of hosting services can handle it. Websites seldom surpass 40-50 MB (megabytes) of storage space. The basic shared hosting package for the most expensive registrar that costs $4.99 pm comes with 10 GB(1000 MB) of storage space.
Bandwidth Limits Bandwidth is the amount of data transfer your hosting allows per month. This is contingent on the amount of users your website receives and the type of files you host i.e. simple web pages, images or video clips, etc. This is also not is a lot to worry about with ordinary websites. Many hosting providers offer “Unlimited Bandwidth” even on their value shared hosting plans.
If you are planning to host high-resolution images or video/movie clips, be careful. Unlimited Bandwidth Shared Host Packages are not to be trusted. If you review the “Terms of Use” and “Common Usage Policy” for the majority of shared hosting services, they will undoubtedly have one section that says that you will not be allowed or will be charged extra for “abnormally excessive data bandwidth”. It is probable that you would be better choosing VPS, dedicated servers Cloud hosting, high-bandwidth packages.
4. Shared Hosting vs Virtual Private Server vs Dedicated Server vs Cloud Hosting
How to choose between these kinds of hosting? Putting it simply, you should choose by how busy or popular you believe your website will be. It should be Shared – Virtual Private Server – Dedicated – Cloud, in this order.
Shared Hosting Most websites on the internet are using Shared hosting. This is ideal for smaller personal sites. They are among the most affordable of hosting services. A shared hosting account hosts several hosting accounts, typically between 10 to 100. They share the server's storage and the same broadband connection.
Shared hosting is highly recommended for starters and small to medium-sized personal as well as commercial websites that do not provide picture, movie or video downloads.They can cost between $5-$15 per month.
Virtual Private servers: Medium websites with moderate bandwidth and storage requirements can use this type of hosting. Virtual Private Servers are hosted at unique ip addresses, like. Virtual Private Servers are hosted by unique IP addresses (e.g. It's as simple as this: Multiple accounts, say 3-10, are hosted on one physical server. Each account is assigned its own unique host ID, also known as an ip address, storage for data, and bandwidth.
VPS hosting costs between $30 to $150 per month, depending on the features for the 1 year period of contract.
Be aware that the cost of all hosting packages will decrease as the contract length increases.
Dedicated server These servers are used by medium-sized websites which require bandwidth and storage that is scalable. They are hosted on separate physical servers. They also have a server that is let to them. They have the ability to manage the server, which includes its unique address, hard drive, ram and bandwidth.
The cost of leasing a dedicated server is contingent on the hardware components that make up the server, such as the hard disk capacity as well as the processor's version as well as the amount of RAM and the broadband connection. The cost of a dedicated server could range from $65 to $200 per month.
Cloud Hosting – A relatively new idea for web hosting. Cloud hosting is the next generation of hosting. Cloud hosting is a way to run multiple servers rather than one server.
Cloud hosting's main benefit hosting is its scalability and cost efficiency. For big websites there is big benefits. When a website expands than it is currently capable of the only thing they have to do is to add another server to join the networked set of servers.
Cloud hosting plans are priced from $100-$550 and beyond depending on the storage and bandwidth requirements.
5. Addon Domains & Sub Domains
Addon domains are domain names that i.e. websites eg. “http://www.yoursite1.com”, “http://www.yoursite2.com” that you want to host with your hosting provider. You should choose the package which allows hosting multiple websites. Register Your Domains Hassle-Free with Namecheap starting at $3.98/year
Most of the cheapest web hosting packages will allow only one site.
Subdomains They are directories you could like to make, e.g. “http://directory1.yoursite.com” or “http://directory2.yoursite.com”. The number of Sub Domains permitted could differ on different packages. Beware of this when you are comparing folders, for example. “http://www.yoursite.com/folder1” or “http://www.yoursite.com/folder2”. There is no limit on folders.
6. Email and FTP accounts.
Email Accounts: These are unique email accounts for your website/s such as. “[email protected]”. You can set these up and distribute it to anyone, acquaintances, visitors, customers. You don't need to worry about this because most hosting packages offer plenty.
FTP Accounts FTP is “File Transfer Protocol”. FTP accounts allow you to access your hosting data via web-based software. FTP accounts can be a huge help for webmasters as they allow you to access your hosting files directly from web design software or FTP softwares. Don't worry about this since most softwares will grant you more than 10 accounts. You can assign the accounts to your designers as well as co workers as you like.
7. Programming Languages and Databases
Frontpage Server Extension PHP5, Custom PHP.ini, Perl w/FASTCGI, Python CGI, Java, Ruby CGI, Ruby on Rails w/FASTCGI, ColdFusion, MySQL(Unix), MsAccess, MySQL(Win) and more.
These are programming softwares and databases utilized by the hosting server. These are necessary for advanced web features like automated content management, user administration, and scripts that run. If you're not sure about these, you don't have to. Because the majority of the packages contain the most popular databases and languages that you might need when you want to use them.
8. Content Management, Forums, and Blogs: Drupal Joomla, Mambo Nucleas Moodle WordPress, Geeklog Lifetype Serendipity and PHPBB SMF Vanilla Forum, etc.
These tools can be used to create blogs, forums and Content Management Systems that improve websites. There are a variety of options available in the majority of packages.
9. Website Tools, Marketing Tools, Shopping Cart Website Tools: Website Builder, Web Analytics Tools, FrontPage Extensions, Google Custom Search, Google Webmaster Tools etc.
These tools are essential for building websites, tracking website popularity and stats as well as site improvements.
Marketing Tools Credit for Google AdWords – $50, Yahoo! Search Marketing Credit – $25, Facebook Ads Credit – $50, etc.
They are advertising credits you can use to advertise your site. If they are included, they can be great bargains.
Shopping Cart This program is vital for anyone wanting to sell products online. They are usually included in many packages.
10. Tips for SEO-friendly web hosting
The location of the server is an important aspect in the process of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Experience shows that search engines prefer websites hosted locally when the search engine is used. Google and other major search engines are known to favor locally hosted websites. It is important to have a UK-based website hosting server in order to get higher rankings in search engines like Google. Another factor that is known to aid SEO for local search results is regional TLDs or domain names. For UK domains.co.uk and.org.uk will be most preferred.
It is important to remember that sharing hosting could affect your site's ranking in search engine optimization. Experts say that sharing a server, or an ip address with the Google penalized website could result in your website suffering. The obvious way to avoid this is to host your site or sites on a separate IP address. This would mean the use of a dedicated server or Virtual Private Server.