With the ever growing popularity of internet, more and more hosting companies pop up from nowhere offering their hosting services. Therefore the hosting industry has never been this competing before. To potential customers like us, choices and competition actually work with us where we can enjoy a better service and rate. However, sometimes too many choices will confuse us too. Everyone is offering the almost same service and rate but who is the best and who should we pick? This article will give you a point list of criteria you can use to compare web hosting providers.
Location
First thing first, you need to know who the hosting provider is, where they are located. This matters because if your users are from local while you are hosting your website elsewhere, this might cause some slow access to the site. Therefore you need to check who they are, what kind of hardware they have and where their data centers are located. However if you website is targeting a worldwide users, the location of server will not matter.
Web space
Secondly, check the hosting package the company is offering. How big is the web space they are giving out? Is it sufficient to cater for your use? For your information, web space is the size of storage that you will get when you subscribe to a hosting plan. It serves to store all your files and data. Therefore if you are building a huge website, you will need more space.
Bandwidth
When users access to your website, they will send request to the server for the particular file with a certain URL. When this request is sent, it will consume bandwidth usage. If your website has too many visitors and send the request at the same time, your server will need to work hard to handle that. In fact if the amount of bandwidth it consumes is more than what is offered in your hosting plan, your website will be down. Your website is congested. However, it's kind of difficult to estimate how big you need your bandwidth to be. But by comparing this, you can roughly have an estimate how good the hosting company can serve you in case you got spikes of traffic.
Add On Domains
Hosting plan nowadays usually come with 1 free domain. This domain will become your website domain name and automatically be the main domain in your hosting. However, chances are you might want to have more than 1 website and where are you going to host the second site? This is where add on domains kick in. Add on domain is the second onward domain or website that you wish to have. Some hosting plan only allows 1 domain name per hosting account. This means you will need to buy another hosting package if you were to build the second website no matter there is space in your current hosting or not. Therefore it is important to know your usage of hosting. If you are planning to build more than one website, go for extra add on domains packages. Most of the major hosting providers give unlimited add on domains on their package.
Software Compatibility
When you are building website, each and everyone uses different program and language. I do not know what language you know but you have to make sure that your hosting knows the language you use. Otherwise your website will not display like expected and even worse, the files hosted might not be readable and executable. Meaning you have wasted your effort in building the websites. Thus it is always a good practice to check the software compatibility of the hosting server. Usually major software like dreamweaver and frontpage are supported.
Website Features
If you plan to build an internet business shopping cart is a must for you. But you are not going to build it manually are you? There are many ready make features provided in hosting. Therefore, you need to know what you are building and check do your potential hosting providers give these conveniences to you or not. Otherwise jump to another hosting provider.
Basically these are the main features that you need to check on hosting providers. In fact the list should not be this short because you need to do hosting price comparison too. However it is needed to understand that different needs has different criterion to look at. Therefore define your end result and search for the suitable hosting plan based on what you need to have in order to get the end result.
Daren is a writer and webmaster. His review Lunarpages website provides a better insight on the web hosting leader. For a good quality of web hosting, Daren recommends Lunarpages web hosting. Have a look at web hosting price comparison here. |
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