It is almost certain that your business needs a website. Even if you do not intend to do business on the Internet, you still want potential customers to be able to find you online. After you go to all the trouble of designing your site, (or having it designed) you still have more work to do before your website is working. You need to have it hosted, and that means you need to pick a hosting service. Read on to learn more about the important considerations you need to keep in mind.
The first thing you want to think about is whether or not you actually need to pay anything at all to have your website hosted. Your ISP (Internet Service Provider) probably offers some bare-bones hosting services whose cost is already included in your Internet plan.
In most cases, the amount of traffic, support, and uptime they can handle are rather limited; these complimentary hosting services are geared more towards private individuals than businesses. However, if your business’s website is very modest, (if you don’t need to do anything more than provide contact information for potential customers, for instance) you might be able to get your website up and running without spending a dime on hosting.
It is much more likely that your website requires professional hosting services, though. When you start looking for a company to handle your hosting, you may well be spoiled for choices and find the breadth of the market overwhelming.
You might be tempted to start off looking for the lowest price available, but this is a mistake. It’s very difficult to compare the prices on hosting packages offered by different hosting companies. The odds of two packages containing the exact same services are rare; you can’t start with comparison shopping because you’ll be comparing apples to oranges.
What you want to look for first of all in a hosting company is a wide array of services. There are two reasons for this: First, the more options they feel comfortable providing to customers, the stronger their technical resources likely are; and second, it is actually more likely than not that your own hosting needs will change over the course of your site’s life.
The next factor to look at is customer satisfaction. The Internet makes it wonderfully easy to get third-party, unbiased reviews of a company’s work. Any hosting company that’s been in business for any length of time will have generated an impressive log of customer reviews online. Sift through a few of them.
Do not be swayed by individual reviews that are exceptionally good or exceptionally bad; instead determine if the overall trend is positive or negative. You can remove any company with a preponderance of negative reviews from consideration.
At this point, you should have narrowed down the list of hosting companies to choose from, all of which offer a broad array of different service packages and have generally positive reviews. This is the time to match your technical needs to the hosting companies’ capabilities.
Unless you have considerable technical expertise of your own, this would be the perfect point to get some assistance. Whoever designed your website (whether it was an employee, an acquaintance, or a paid consultant) would be an excellent person to call. Not only will they have the clearest possible picture of your site’s technical requirements, they also likely have hosting preferences and recommendations of their own.
From an enormous field of possibilities, you will have zeroed in on the single hosting company that’s right for you. The process is not always quick or easy, but it is definitely worth going through. Having a hosting service that fulfills all of your needs at an affordable price will save you a lot of trouble in the long run.