Selecting a hosting plan is a critical step when you want to start up a website.  Prior posts from me were about domain name choice and website creation.  Next we will discuss hosting:  One of the critical decisions you will have to make is what type of hosting plan to use and what hosting provider to choose.

Once you have created the pages for your website, now you want to publish it to the internet.  To have your website seen on the internet you will need to choose a hosting plan.  By purchasing a domain name you have branded, or named your website.  You own the name, but now you must pay rent to someone to actually get your website online.  With a hosting plan you will be paying a service provider to publish your website on the internet for all to see.  The key considerations for choosing a good hosting plan will be discussed here.

SERVICE  The most important consideration is the level of service provided.  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.  If your website is not available on the internet you are losing opportunities to connect with customers.  Strategically the best thing you can do for your website upfront is to choose a hosting company that is reliable in terms of customer service as well as “uptime”.

UPTIME  When shopping for a hosting company, find out if they have an 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! The best hosting providers will have a track record of up to 99.9% uptime, which essentially guarantees you that downtime is negligible or even non-existent.

SIZE  What size, or how many pages will the website have?  The amount of disk space all of your website’s pages takes up will determine the size of the hosting plan you will need.  If your website will be media rich with videos or music or photo files, or a large e-commerce site with a lot of catalogue pages, you will have to take space into consideration as a criteria for choosing the right hosting plan.

LINUX OR WINDOWS  Which operating system should your hosting plan use?  BTW it does not matter what operating system you are using on your personal computer.  What programming language was used in the Web site design?  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 html 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?  Hosting plans are usually sold at different level plans according to the bandwith that will be required.  Bandwidth = Traffic.  Obviously more bandwidth is better because it allows more visitors to visit your site, but at the beginning this will be hard for you to gauge.  The best advice here is to start off with a low cost, low bandwidth plan and upgrade it later as the traffic to your website grows.

SHARED OR DEDICATED HOSTING  The question of shared vs. dedicated hosting is really answered in a very simple way:  A shared hosting plan is exactly as it sounds, and means that your website will be stored on a server along with lots of other websites.  In this hosting format you generally have no ability to make changes to the resident software on the system, meaning you cannot change or upgrade the operating system, or the database management system, etc.  You will have to work within the software structure provided by the hosting company.  Using dedicated (or virtual dedicated) hosting means that you have full control over the server your website is stored on and that only your data occupies the space on that server.  In other words, you would determine what operating system to use, what type database management software, what type of blog software, what type shopping cart, etc., etc.  Generally customer support will be low to non-existent, since this type of hosting is geared to the advanced user who will be using his own custom setup.  The bottom line:  start off with shared hosting if you are a beginner, until you are advanced enough to progress to your own controlled dedicated hosting environment.

At StartMyWebsiteToday.com our uptime guarantee is 99.9% and we offer 24/7 customer service.  We also have a selection of shared, dedicated, and virtual dedicated hosting plans to suit all budgets and sizes and types of websites. To review the options we offer, click HERE: Hosting plans.