Hosting plan choice is a major step when you choose to start up a website.  Prior posts from me were about domain name choice and website creation.  Which brings the subject of hosting into play:  Early on in your decision making process, you will want to shop for a hosting plan.

Once your website has been created, it is time to make it go live on the internet.  In order to do so, you will need 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.  In it’s simplest terms a hosting plan is paying a company to broadcast your website onto the internet.  Let’s go over some of the key important factors to consider when choosing a hosting plan:

SERVICE  The number one thing to look for in a hosting plan is service.  No consideration, including price, should supersede Good Customer Service as the criteria for choosing your hosting provider.  After you have published, or “gone live” on the internet, the last thing you want is for the website to go down and become unavailable to potential 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  How large is your site?  One of the determining factors for the price of most hosting plans is the amount of space required to store the website on their server’s hard drive.  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  This question refers to the operating systems available for hosting and which one to choose.  This question has no relevance to the brand of operating system you are using on your computer.  The determining factor here is what programming language was used to design the website.  For example, if CGI or PHP programming language was used, the best choice for the hosting operating system would be Linux.  For a website designed with ASP, the best choice would be Windows.  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  Will you be expecting lots of visitors to your website?  Hosting plans are usually sold at different level plans according to the bandwith that will be required.  Bandwidth = Traffic.  The more visitors or traffic you expect on your site, the higher the bandwidth you will need, and the more the plan will cost.  Usually the best way to proceed here is to start with a basic low bandwidth plan, and upgrade later as the traffic begins to flow to the website.

SHARED OR DEDICATED HOSTING  Whether or not to choose shared hosting over dedicated hosting comes down to the following:  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.  This type of hosting is definitely geared to the more advanced user, and usually you won’t be able to get as much customer support because it will be a custom setup.  The best advice I can give to the newbie is to use shared hosting at first, until you gain more experience and abilities and are ready to take the plunge into something as advanced as dedicated hosting.

At StartMyWebsiteToday.com I offer 99.9% guaranteed uptime and offer customer service 24/7.  We also have a selection of shared, dedicated, and virtual dedicated hosting plans to suit all budgets and sizes and types of websites. To see what is available, click HERE: Hosting plans.