Shopping Your First Web Host

There are companies that offer servers that are connected to the internet and provide a spot for you to put your web site up on the web.  These businesses are called web hosting companies.  These people provide a space on a server and rent you space and bandwidth for your site. Some of the larger more established companies can afford to have their own server to put themselves on the internet.  For most of us, renting a space on a server is what we have to do.

When you begin shopping for a web hosting company, you will find there are many companies out there. Next, you will discover that there is a great range in plans that these companies offer. You can even find a web host that will do this for free; some charge up to $125.00 per month.

One thing remains constant with web hosts, the old adage “you get what you pay for”. When you find a host that will put your site up for free there are things to watch out for.  First, just how many other sites are you sharing the server with? Is there even enough bandwidth to handle an average day of traffic to your site?  You see what I am getting at.  Free does you no good if every time someone goes to your site it has such a slow response time that the visitor just leaves in frustration. Usually, on a free hosting site, the load between all the websites becomes so great that no one on the server gets even a little bit of performance out of the CPU.

Other hosting companies on the other hand, will offer you an array of services that can, if placed with the right company, make your presence on the web quite pain free. They will offer a dedicated server, and although this will be the most expensive plan, in the long run it turns out that it usually is the best.  The company may offer data recovery services, so if you dump your information you have been gathering for the last 90 days,  they can recover it for you in a relatively short time. They will offer you technical assistance, design assistance, email administration, and troubleshooting. This is the type of hosting company you want to become involved with.

As I mentioned earlier, the dedicated host service is where it’s at. When you have a dedicated server you never have to worry about performance issues no matter how much traffic you are getting. With a dedicated server, you also control the security on the site and server; this in its self is worth its weight in gold. By having a dedicated server, you also will have the option of taking over most of the administration associated with your site and this can save you considerable money on support services,

When you are shopping for a hosting company, always ask them for figures showing how much bandwidth you will get and what kind of a load the server already has on it.