How To Locate Suitable Website Hosting For Your Specific Needs
The Internet contains a very large number of websites. This number is continuously growing. For a website to be visible on the web, it needs to be hosted on a web server. You can therefore imagine how big the website hosting market must be. The myriad of hosting companies out there can be quite daunting if you are new to the website scene. We will therefore try to give you some basic information to help you make the right decision.
As a jumping off point, you should never pay for something that you do not need. If yours is a private site with a number of holiday pictures, you will most probably be satisfied with what you can get from a free hosting account. Perhaps your ISP offers you a couple of megabytes free space. If not, you don’t have to go far on the Internet before running into a free hosting company.
A free hosting account has a couple of drawbacks though. In the first place it’s unlikely that you will be able to use a top level domain name, such as yourowndomain.com. The most common situation is that you will have to use a subdomain provided by the hosting company. For a personal website this is normally not a huge problem. What could be more problematic for many people is that the hosting company usually displays banner ads at the top of each page.
If free hosting is too restrictive for you, then you should look at paid hosting. With a paid hosting account you can host your own domain name. You will also get a much larger amount of disk space and data transfer than with a free hosting account. On top of that you will be able to use programming language such as PHP, Perl (cgi) and javascript.
When it comes to the amount of disk space and bandwidth that you buy, beware of what is called overselling in the industry. Some hosting companies provide ‘unlimited’ web hosting and data transfer for a few dollars per month. Then they have a clause somewhere in their terms and conditions which states that if you use more than a certain amount, your account gets suspended.
Rather buy a specific amount of space and bandwidth that is sufficient for your purposes. Unless you are going to host videos or millions of pictures on your website, even 1Gb of space should be enough. To give you an idea, this is enough space to host about 10 000 average web pages with the odd picture included.
Should you plan to sell widgets on your site, you are probably going to need a shopping card facility. That should be included with your hosting account. When it comes to payment, you have various options. If you are simply going to link to an outside payment company who will then process the credit card payment on your behalf, you have no problem. To accept credit card information on your own website will mean you need a secure server, a security certificate and a dedicated IP number.
Not all website hosting companies offer the same quality of service. For a business website, uptime is very important. Attempt to find a company, therefore, that offers a guarantee for uptime in excess of 99.7%. They should also have knowledgeable support staff on duty around the clock, 7 days a week.
Get the low down on how to find the right web hosting plan to suit your requirements and budget instantly in our complete Gossimer overview.
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