Once your website has been created, it is time to make it go live on the internet. In order to do so, you will need a hosting plan. A hosting plan is different from a domain name. You own your domain name but you rent a hosting plan. A hosting plan in it’s simplest terms is paying a company to broadcast your website onto the internet. This article covers what to look for in a hosting plan.
SERVICE The number one thing to look for in a hosting plan is service. It does not matter that a multitude of features are offered or if the price is low if the service you will be getting with your hosting plan is sub par or even worse, nonexistent. Once your website is live on the internet you will want it to be up all the time. Therefore should a problem occur it is important to select a hosting provider that is readily available and will resolve the issue in as timely a manner as possible.
UPTIME What is the hosting company's "uptime guarantee". Many guarantee 99% uptime for their servers. That sounds great, but it does mean that your site could go down for 1% of the time, which means over 7 hours out of each month! If you can, choose a host guaranteeing 99.9 uptime.
SIZE How large is your site? Most sites do not require much space but if you're planning on having a large site with a lot of multimedia content or an ecommerce site selling multiple items, you'll probably need additional disk space.
DESIGN How was your Web site designed? For example, if you designed a website using ASP or ASP.NET, you'll need to find a Windows hosting plan. If you have a Web site that uses CGI or PHP, you'll need to get a Linux hosting plan. For the novice user who is building a simple website the above may not be a consideration at first, but may become important later on as you become more experienced and add more features to your website.
TRAFFIC How much traffic or how many visitors do you expect monthly? The more visitors or traffic you expect on your site, the higher the bandwidth you will need.Finding the right web host for beginners can be a challenge with all the web hosts claiming to be the best. Let’s discuss web hosting options for a person who is inexperienced about how to select the best web host for beginners.
You are just beginning to explore the Internet and you have decided that you need a website on the Internet to be successful. You researched the many web hosts that all claim to have the best features and you are over whelmed by all the possibilities.
Most of the time, people looking for a web host asks all the wrong questions about the web host. Since the Internet is considered "technical", it seems that people automatically start looking at how many gigs of memory and how much bandwidth each web host provides for the price. They read that they can get 10,000 email addresses, 1,000 FTP accounts, and 1,000 mailing lists (Isn’t that a joke? Walmart might need that kind of support, but a starting website? I don’t think so!) They consider what software is provided? .ASP, Perl, PHP, .NET, Cold Fusion, etc. (Yes, "etc." is not software).
People tend to get so bogged down in the technical aspects (hardware and software) of what a web host offers that they lose site of the basic fact that the hardware side of the web host is only the medium that carries their message to the world via the Internet. It is the means to the end.
Web hosts are a dime a dozen and the competition for customers is fierce.
On the hardware technical side, a web host should provide:
* A secure data center that stays up running 100% of the time.
* Bandwidth wide enough to handle the all the traffic quickly.
* Storage to handle all the data.
* Processor speed fast enough to process the traffic without delay.
* A secure, reliable connection to the Internet
The Best Web Host for all Times is Godaddy
