Finding the Right Web Host

Now that you have your website design complete and you are ready to go into business on the internet, you must shop carefully for your webhosting company.   Your first reaction may be to go with the guy that has the best price.  Don’t do it!  All web hosting companies are not created alike, and you should shop for the one that best suits your needs.

While selecting your web hosting company, you will come across many different decisions that will lead to the right company for you. Money is a big one, but by far, not the most important. If you choose your web hosting company by price alone that would be like taking your car to a strange shop because it was cheaper than one you knew did quality work. You just don’t know if that savings is going to be worth it in the long run.

The first and foremost thing for your consideration is going to be Load.  Does this company have the capacity to not only carry your load, but the loads that the other websites on the server will demand? A good, solid, web hosting company will advertise they have hundreds of servers and huge amount of bandwidth available.  When a web hosting company advertises like this they are usually telling the truth.

Even now, that you have found that wonderful web hosting company with the tons of servers and more bandwidth than you can shake a stick at, there is a huge difference between total capacity and usable capacity. It does not matter how much they boast the servers and bandwidth if they are at capacity with clients at this moment.  What is left for you?  If they put your site up, everyone will suffer from poor performance as the CPU shifts and shuffles the load to handle it.

So just remember to ask about usable capacity when you are talking with them.   They will be able to back up what they told you with figures and numbers so you can see for yourself that this is the right spot for your web site or not.

The next important thing to look for in a web hosting company is reliability. No matter how much power and how many servers the company has, if they are constantly experiencing down time, that all does not help you much now does it?  You want your site available at any time a client may want to pull it up, down time will cost you business.

Be sure you get operation figures to back up the “we are up and running 99.9% of the time and never go down for longer than 3 minutes”.

Next on the list is security. You have to know that your site is protected from spam and viruses.  You should check to see that the company has a good working plan if something comes down, and that the staff has the professional background to carry out the plan.