The Best Web Hosting Company - What To Look For!

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When choosing a website hosting company, it is important to consider several things before making your choice. As they say ” You never get a second chance at a first impression.” This is true when we are talking about your website!

Web hosting is a service that allows users to post Web pages to the Internet. A Web host is a business that provides the technologies and services needed for Web sites to be viewed on the Web.

When you choose hosting for your website consider the following things:

Price:  Don’t simply look for the lowest price. Your website is your lively hood and reliablity is your number one priority. This may not be available with cheap web hosting.

Technical Support: Ensure it is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week? You’ll be surprised at what time of the day or night you have a question you need answering. Also, as your web host can be anywhere in the world, daytime for you might be nighttime for them. So 24×7 is vital.

Features: Various internet hosting companies offer a variety of services. Make a list of what you know you want your website to do. Here are a few services you will want to consider. Set up fees, transfer fees, email aliases, site stats, contol panel, site creation tool, front page extensions, submit to search engines, sub domains, multiple domain discounts.

Disk Space: The amount of disk space that will be allotted to your web site is another of the key elements in a good web host package. While it might seem that 30 megabytes is plenty of room, the potential for growth of your company means that you could easily need more space later. If you choose a web hosting provider that simply can’t offer more space, you might find that your growth will be severely limited.

E-mail accounts: How many e-mail accounts do you need? You’ll probably need one for each employee and one for each department (sales, accounts, support). Make sure you purchase a hosting plan that has enough e-mail accounts. Also, do you want full POPS access, Web-based e- mail, or both?

E-commerce: Will you be selling goods or services through your site? If not, there’s no need to sign up for an e-commerce web hosting service. If you are, e-commerce web hosting services such as shopping cart software, SSL support and a merchant account will be vital.

Speed: You need to know how fast your internet hosting provider can provide access to your visitors.

Uptime: This may be the most important thing when choosing a web hosting company. You can not make money if your web site is down.

It is reasonsable to expect to spend $10-$15 a month for a good hosting company. I personally use Blue Host for my hosting needs. I have found them to be reliable, fast, offer top customer service, and reasonably priced. They offer an unlimited domains package for around $7, so you can host as many websites as you can build.

In Summary, when considering where to host your website you will want to consider, Webpage Space, Bandwidth, Customer Support, Reliability, Speed, Company Stability and of course price.
 
 
About the author:
 
Steve is the owner of Cool Net Host. He has used many web site hosting companies over the years and decided to build Cool Net Host to review these companies, ranking them from 1 - 10. Before buying your next hosting package read the reviews on his website first. It could save you from making a costly mistake.

Domain Names and Search Engine Ranking

Does the length of your website’s domain name registration affect search engine optimization and results?

Should you renew your domain name for a long period of time? And if so, how long is long enough?

If you want to stay ahead of your competition, then you might consider looking at the length of time your competitors have registered their domain names. If your competitors have generally renewed their domain names for one or two years, you might consider registering your domain name for 5 or 10 years. While putting off your domain name’s expiration date might help your search engine rankings, keep in mind that this may be only a small victory when it comes to search engine rankings.

Its good business sense to register a domain for at least 10 years. You don’t want to deal with the annual process of renewing them every year. It’s best to obtain the domain names that you want to keep for a while and renew them on a 5 to 10 year plan.

If your domain name expires, there’s a good chance that someone will register your domain name immediately after it expires. If, for whatever reason, you don’t renew your domain name, someone watching a ‘watch list’ of expiring domain names will try to capitalize on the online business that you’ve built over the years. They know that there is potential website traffic they can have simply by renewing your old domain name. By renewing your domain name for several years, your domain name won’t expire for a while, and it won’t be opened up to expired domain name buyers.

If you really want to stay ahead of the competition, you might consider registering or renewing your domain name for 100 years. Currently, Network Solutions is the only registrar offering the 100 year option, which costs $999.00. GoDaddy, currently offers to renew or register a domain name for 10 years, at a discount of $6.95 per year.
 
Yes, you can lose critical positioning in the search engines if you don’t re-register your domain name in time. You may have to start the SEO process all over again!

Do You Need A Lot Of Bandwidth?

Bandwidth measures the volume of data transmitted over an internet connection. You need to know how much bandwidth you will need before choosing a hosting plan.

Be careful when someone claims they provide unlimited bandwidth or monthly transfer. Anyone claiming “Unlimited Bandwidth” is simply lying. There’s no such thing as “Unlimited Bandwidth”.

I’ve never seen any broadband company offering an internet connection as “Unlimited Megabytes per Second.” So, how could a web hosting company, which normally doesn’t even own its own access lines, specify to customers that it will give them “Unlimited Bandwidth”?

Most of the time, high bandwidth sites on these “Unlimited” plans will be disconnected, and no refund given. Normally, the web hosting company will say that the site violated its Acceptable Use Policy or Terms of Service.

Whenever you visit a site promoting “Unlimited Bandwidth” as one of the account features, be sure to visit the Acceptable Use Policy, or the Terms of Service. Read the fine print about the so-called “Unlimited” disclaimer.

When you first look for web hosting services (those who state clearly bandwidth offered), you have to make your best estimation and watch your usage carefully in the first few months. Take these factors into consideration while estimating.

• How many users will access your web site?
• How many pages to be accessed?
• How big are the graphic and HTML files?

Large audio/video files, computer programs, and file downloads require more bandwidth. Flash web sites use tons of bandwidth. Virtual Reality (VR) and full-length three-dimensional audio/visual presentations require the most bandwidth of all.

Your best guess may not be totally accurate, but still gives you something to work with until your site has been online for a while and actual traffic statistics have been generated.

Don’t fall for the unlimited bandwidth trap that some companies throw at you.

On Cool Net Host we review the top web hosting companies and rank them from 1 to 10. REad our reviews before purchasing any hosting package.

 

Which Web Hosting Package?

Web hosting comes in many forms. Whether you are looking for business web hosting for a corporate site or web hosting for a personal site there are numerous packages available. Likewise web hosting providers are plentiful and on the surface appear to offer similar deals. But what about under the surface? What is their support like? What is their server uptime like? What are their policies when your site exceeds the package parameters?

Prior to signing up with any web hosting company, it is important to understand what the aim of your website is and how much traffic you can expect, which ultimately leads to how much bandwidth you will use. Web hosting companies have packages to suit virtually every type of website.

To help make your decision I have put together a short summary of the different types of hosting:

Shared Web Hosting

Also known as a virtual hosting service, is a web hosting service where many websites occupy a single web server. The server is split into the various domain names so that they do not interfere with each other. This can be likened to separate partitions on your hard disk.

Free Web Hosting

As the name states, it is free. However, this type of hosting usually comes with built in advertisements and has limited functionality. This type of service is a good way of trialling website ideas or for small personal websites. Of course you can always upgrade when the need arises.

Clustered Web Hosting

This consist of multiple servers hosting the same content for better resource utilization. It is a perfect solution for high availability dedicated hosting, or creating an ascendable web hosting solution.

Reseller Web Hosting

This is an excellent option if you have lots of websites as you can host them on one account. This service also allows the user to become web hosts themselves, hosting websites for their friends or family or even clients. It is considered an inexpensive way for web hosting entrepreneurs to start a company.

Virtual Dedicated Server

Also known as virtual private server, bridges the gap between shared web hosting services and dedicated hosting services, giving independence from other customers of the service in terms of software and at less cost than a physical dedicated server.

Dedicated Hosting Service

This is a hosting service that provides the user with their own server. These can be hired on a monthly basis, no long contracts, solely for the use of the client only. However, the client is also responsible for the security and maintenance of his own dedicated server.

Grid Hosting

Is a distributed form of hosting that offers online computation or storage as a metered commercial service. Basically pay as you go.

Home Server

Typically a PC or other computer, connected to a home network that provides services to other household devices such as file and/or printer serving, media center serving, web serving, account authentication, and domain control. You can also use it as a server on the internet, but you will need to purchase a leased line from your telephone or cable company to cope with the demands of a high traffic site.

These are the various types of hosting available to anyone looking to put up a website. Unless you are a huge corporation, start small and upgrade as your site(s) requires it.

On Cool Net Host, I review many web hosting companies and rank the best from 1 to 10. If you’re looking for a new web host, pay a visit now before parting with your hard earned cash.