Reliable web hosting
Business web hosting must be reliable. The last thing you need to worry about is that the provider's service becomes unavailable for long stretches of time. What kind of uptime guarantee do they provide you with? How long have they been in business?
Hosting support when you need it
What level of support does the company offer you? You may not need 24x7 service but is their support desk open reasonable hours? Beware of companies that only offer email web hosting support. Some of these companies will tell you that they only offer email hosting support in order to keep costs down. What they often don't say is that they are doing the business part time and can't possibly be available to answer the phone. When you need help, you may have to wait days to get service.
Ecommerce web hosting
Do you plan to sell online? If so, does the web host have shopping carts available? Are they included for free or are they extra? Get the names of the ecommerce shopping carts they provide, and research their capabilities to be able to determine which one is best for you.
Website response times
Be sure to ask the hosting provider for a list of websites that are hosted on their servers. Enter a few of them into your browser and pay attention to how fast they come up. If all of them take a long time to load, this may indicate that the hosting provider's servers are overloaded. Doing a ping on the website addresses is another way to measure the time it takes for the server to respond. Keep in mind though, that a ping test will be more of a measure of a bandwidth bottleneck than a server problem.
Virtual Dedicated Web Hosting
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Most webmasters on the net today are familiar with what the industry calls shared web hosting accounts. A shared hosting account is where you rent a small amount of space on a server which is shared among many other users.
This is a cheap way to get started online but it has many disadvantages - you will encounter email delivery problems because of spam complaints against other sites on the same server. You will find your site s grinding to a halt when someone else does some heavy database work on your server. You might even ..
Web Hosting bandwidth: How much do you get?
How much bandwidth does the web hosting service provide you with every month? If it is only 500mb per month and your website is 50 kilobytes in size, this will only allow 10,000 visitors per month to hit your website. If you expect to need more, make sure you can live with the extra charges the hosting provider will levy. If you website traffic explodes, you may be on the hook for large bandwidth overage charges.
Small business web hosting that is reliable is a vital part of any success your company will experience online. Doing your homework ahead of time will save you lots of grief later on.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
An Introduction To Professional Web Hosting This article is An Introduction To Professional Web Hosting.
Once you decide to run a Web site and do it properly, you require a Web server for storing your data as well as an Internet connection to it. The server will be provided by hosting service providers (HSPs). Different HSPs will offer you different space (amount of data) and bandwidth (Net connection measured usually in MB). You will find different types of Web hosting like virtual web hosting, dedicated hosting; co-locating hosting, shared hosting, and reseller hosting. Shared and virtual Web hosting means the same thing. By ..
Joe Duchesne is the president of Yowling.com. Business web hosting is their specialty. Reprint freely as long as you provide a keyword rich clickable link back to yowling.com from this resource box.
