Many small businesses, when first starting out online, are looking to keep costs low, and the first thing they do is get a cheap web page hosting provider. Unfortunately, a cheap, low-quality web host is likely to cause many problems, and cost you more money in the long term. Continue on to the article below for some great web page hosting advice for small business owners.
Look at numerous companies before choosing your hosting service. Taking two reviews on a company and using those to make your final decision can be detrimental to your choice because that’s not enough different sources to truly know whether or not the hosting agency is truly that good or that bad.
Web Hosts
Find out each potential web host’s uptime–the percentage of time the server is up and working correctly–and avoid web hosts that have a lot of outages. Companies with many outages generally make excuses, and show that they aren’t reliable, since they don’t do anything about them and don’t intend to. Web hosts that experience frequent outages cannot provide you with top-quality service, and you should not commit to any contracts with these types of companies.
Be sure that you register your domain’s name using a different company than your web host in case there’s some kind of disagreement between the two of you. This way you can still have the domain name, and can put the site on a different server. If you register your domain through your host, they have control of it.
Make a list of priorities prior to choosing a web host. Determine your needs and wants in advance and check how well each potential web host meets those needs. This list can help you avoid bad decisions that you might base on just one or two criteria.
When you decide on your web host, stick to monthly payments as opposed to lump-time payments. Because most businesses and even web hosts are unpredictable, you never know what your hosting needs will be in the long term. If your business grows too big for the host or your business closes, you may lose the money you paid, unless the host states otherwise.
Choose a hosting service that can offer you enough space for your website to grow. While a simple HTML page is small, as soon as you begin adding pictures, video, or other media, the size can balloon quickly. Look for a plan that gives you 100MB of space to develop your website in the next year or so.
Unlimited hosting services rarely are. For instance, if a web host has unlimited disk space, they might limit the file types they allow. Also, infinite bandwidth might be considered to be tiered payment plans. Be sure to read the fine print and know what “unlimited” means in terms of your plan.
Choosing low prices over service and features is not a good solution. Your site needs to be live nearly 100% of the time to guarantee you can make money and prosper. Try some of the above tips to narrow your search for the perfect web page hosting service.