Hosting plan choice is a major step when you choose to start up a website.  In prior posts I discussed choosing a domain name and creation of web pages.  Which brings the subject of hosting into play:  Choosing a hosting plan is a primary step in launching your fledgling web presence.

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.  A hosting plan is different from a domain name.  You own your domain name but you rent a hosting plan.  In it’s simplest terms a hosting plan is paying a company to broadcast your website onto the internet.  The key considerations for choosing a good hosting plan will be discussed here.

SERVICE  The most important consideration is the level of service provided.  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  What is the hosting company’s “uptime guarantee”? The better hosting providers will offer up to 99% uptime.  Even at 99% average uptime it can mean that your website will be off the internet for over 7 hours per 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?  Most hosting providers set the pricing on their hosting plans according to the space taken up on their servers by the website.  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.  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.  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  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.  Dedicated server hosting gives you full control over setup of the operating system and auxilliary programs such as database management or shopping cart or database management software.  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 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.