Finding The Right Web Host In Today’s Market
Disk Space: How much space are you going to need? Your needs here are going to depend on the size of your site. The average web site only uses around 400mbs of space. That’s equivalent to around 600 mp3 songs or 500 high quality photos. Although most hosts do not allow file sharing or the storing of mp3 files due to copyright laws.
Bandwidth:Most hosting companies offer a variety of bandwidth options in their plans. So exactly what is bandwidth as it relates to web hosting? Put simply, bandwidth is the amount of traffic that is allowed to occur between your web site and the rest of the Internet. The amount of bandwidth a hosting company can provide is determined by their network connections, both internal to their data center and external to the public Internet.
Most personal or small business sites will not exceed more than 10GB of bandwidth per month. If you have a web site that is composed of static web pages and you expect little traffic to your site on a daily basis, go with a low bandwidth plan. If you go over the amount of bandwidth allocated in your plan, your hosting company could charge you over usage fees, so if you think the traffic to your site will be significant, you may want to look at a plan with more bandwidth.
Email: Make sure the hosting company offers adequate email accounts. If your a business with 100 employees or more and they only offer 5 email accounts with there package then it’s not a good plan. Email accounts also use your disk space if you have 50 email account and they each use 50mbs of storage that will go against your total disk space for the plan you choose.
Extra Features: There are two popular control panels that alot of hosting companies use these are cPanel and Plesk. They both offer similar features and are easy to navigate. Control panels can take alot of the headaches out of managing your site as they include one click installs of popular software like forums, blogs and content management software. They also have features like traffic stats to your site, server load issues and database management.
Uptime/Reliability: Whats better 100% or 99.995% uptime? The truth is nobody can offer 100% uptime it’s truly not feasible. There are so many factors involved including network outages,server failure, power failure, which are beyond the control of your hosting provider. I believe people should be more concerned with the support they get than uptime. If a server goes down for say 3 minutes in a month that uptime for that server would amount to 99.997% for that particular month. That’s considered excellent in hosting terms. Now if you have a problem with your site, say you accidentally deleted your database and you need a backup restored and you put in a support ticket and don’t receive a reply till the following day that would be serious downtime. Test there support system send them a email and wait and see how long it takes to get a reply. I’m not saying if they don’t reply within 5 minutes find another host but a time frame over 4 hours would be pushing it.
Cost:Cost is often a major consideration factor for many Website owners. You should decide on how much you can afford or are willing to pay for hosting. Watch out for setup fees and long term contracts that offer lower prices per month. If you sign up for a 2 year plan and start having problems 4 months down the road the likelihood of getting a refund for the remaining amount is about zero.
These are just a few answers to some of the basic questions regarding finding a good web host. http://www.proclanhosting.com
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