Choosing your best hosting company can be very hard for someone who has limited knowledge about Web servers, I don’t know about you but I’ll assume that you’re a newbie in terms of web hosting facilities and options so I won’t discuss technical details but I’ll mention 5 technical tips and explain it in simple words so you can be aware before you decide to go with any web hosting company.
1) Data Transfer (Traffic/Bandwidth)
Be careful about the bandwidth which is the amount of data bytes transferred from your website to your visitors, it is calculated based on the images and text contents that moves from your web hosting to your visitors when they visit a certain webpage on your website, don’t believe in free or unlimited bandwidth because extra bandwidth costs the web hosting company and they have to pay for it so always go for web hosting that has a bandwidth of 3 GB and up.
2) Disk space
Web hosting companies offer these days 500 MB -1GB and up and they know you won’t use all this disk space so they are generous, trust me you need only 10-20 MB so don’t ever consider any web hosting because of the disk space, it’s the last thing to consider when comparing.
3) Reliability (% of downtime)
Downtime is the amount of time per year when you web hosting server goes down so your visitors will not be able to see your website and you will lose them so reliability should be 99% and I want to say even more than that 99.5%, don’t go below 99%.
4) Technical support
Technical support includes chatting with a person from the web hosting company for quick question and/or sending web tickets for technical/sales issues, my web hosting replies to my tickets within an hour which is really good.
5) FTP, PHP, PERL,.htaccess, MySQL, cronTabs
FTP is a facility to upload your files to your hosting, PHP and PERL are scripting language many web applications are written using them for example WordPress is written in PHP and MySQL as the database end, don’t ever think about sacrificing PHP and MySQL
cronTabs is a feature of making your web hosting running some tasks based on a schedule you specify and the best example is installing a free autoresponder, just to let you know I didn’t know about the cronTabs when I bought my web hosting and they disable the cronTabs to improve their web server performance.
6) SSL (Secure Server and shopping cart)
Some hosting companies offer shopping cart and of course any shopping cart use SSL for securing your credit card transactions, so you should consider this option if you’re planning to run an online store.
7) Email, Autoresponders, POP3, Mail Forwarding
Your web hosting should let you create emails on your domain name so it will be in the format of “myemail@myDomain.com”, always be careful of the emails disk space as sometimes they offer very low email space that you have to always delete emails to avoid bouncing back any emails coming to you because of exceeding over quota
8) Control Panel
Some web hosting call it cPanel and some call it different names, whatever what you should consider is your ability to finish all the above mentioned tasks from your cPanel without referring back to your hosting company.
Think about it, what if every time you want to create an email and you send a support ticket to them to be created after 24-48 hours, what a frustration.
9) Adding multiple domains and sub domains
Some web hosting offer one free domain when you buy their web hosting, don’t be fooled by this, yes it’s good to have it but always consider the ability to have many domains on your hosting, I don’t want to say unlimited but you should have 5-6 domains and I think that’s enough.
But the sub domains which are the ability to create different folders on your domain like “http://blog.myDomain.com” so bottom line, sub domains should be unlimited or enough to let you play around.
10) Windows or Unix server
All PHP, MySQL and PERL should run on UNIX/LINUX servers but not ASP which is a windows scripting language on the other side most of the Windows servers are capable of running PHP, PERL and MySQL so you’ll be surprised when I advise you it’s better to host on UNIX/LINUX servers that Windows for many reasons regarding reliability and performance.
Actually they are many reasons; I don’t want to go through all of them as it’s off point in my article.
Again remember, I can only help you to build your website Free.
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