Tips On Shopping And Saving On Website Hosting
Having your own home on the internet is a great experience, whether you’re a small business owner or you just want a place to show off your latest pictures to your friends and family.
Nowadays, web hosting costs are very affordable and the prices keep going down. Years ago, people would pay hundreds of dollars a month for small web sites. Today that amount will allow you to run a large corporate business online, so things have definitely changed for the better.
As you look around online, you will see web sites that offer extremely low prices for their web hosting service, but remember this: you get what you pay for. It’s not that all of the really cheap web hosts are bad, but wouldn’t it be worth it to you if a few extra bucks a month gets you better service, security, and peace of mind?
Let’s take a look at a few things to consider when looking for your ideal web host. If a very cheap host can meet these criteria, you may have found yourself a fantastic deal!
Total Storage
Take a moment to consider how much web space you’ll actually need for your web site. Is this going to be a business web site or simply for personal use? If it’s for business, then you’re probably looking at more space. You may need to host lots of pictures or videos for customers to see and these can quickly eat up a good amount of web space. Will there be music on your site? Music files can take up a lot of space as well, so you need to determine what you’ll be hosting on your web site, in addition to your web pages, to see how much storage space you’ll need. Most host provide anywhere from 500 MG to 1 GB of more which is more than adequate for most (99% of) sites.
Data Transfer / Bandwidth
HJust what is bandwidth? It’s the amount of traffic that your web site is able to handle on a monthly basis. If you have a lot of pictures and videos on your site and a lot of people coming to your site to see them, that will eat up your bandwidth very quickly.
Not getting enough bandwidth is one of the biggest mistakes that new web site shoppers make! Start with at least one gigabyte and then see if you need more after you start receiving traffic to your web site.
Email “Aliases”
Make sure that your web host will allow you to have multiple email accounts for your domain name. Most web hosts will allow you to have hundreds of email accounts that you can use at your discretion. Also, be sure that they allow email forwarding and pop email access. This is really handy if you have a favorite email address that you like to use because you can forward any email addresses from your domain to another email address. It’s also very convenient in that you are able to keep all of your emails together.
Website Tools
Your web host should have an assortment of tools at your disposal that allow you to easily install blogs, forums, video applications, and even view traffic statistics all with the click of a few buttons. This will make your life much easier and save you a lot of time having to manage your site. If they don’t, then it’s time to move on to another web host that does!
Tech Support
If you’re new to running a web site and are pretty sure that you’ll have a lot of questions, this will be the most important aspect of web hosting for you. Make sure that they respond to all your questions, and reply in plain English, without technical mumbo-jumbo. Also, make sure they reply within a few hours, not days, because some problems just can’t wait. 24hrs a day, 7 days a week is important also. Be sure to read over their support policies and follow their guidelines because you’ll get better, faster service by doing so.