When considering which company to use for web hosting, you should base this decision on what you’ll be using the hosting for and what type of budget you have. If you are just getting started with an online business or online presence, there are some things you can sacrifice by way of services or features for a lower cost. The nicest part about this scenario is that web hosting is becoming so competitive that you have very little to sacrifice and have access to very low cost.
The real question you may decide on is for what purpose you are using the hosting. If you need it for hosting a few simple websites or even a single website for your business, you should have a very simple approach, something that would cost you less than $100 per year at most. If you have a higher requirement of security selling some online products or managing some online software that users have access to, you may have additional requirements for uptime or availability which would require you to invest some more money in a dedicated “managed” hosting platform. Lastly, you may require some admin specific to your company where you may choose to co-locate your servers at an ISP with available bandwidth, but still manage your servers and do all the maintenance yourself (internally).
Determining how much budget you require may also influence which company you decide to use. You can decide to start small and assuming you have a solid backup of your hosted files (applications, databases, sites, images, etc), then growth to a larger or more stable hosting platform should not be a difficult process. Of course, the opposite is true as well. If you start a bit to big, you can always “downgrade” if you have more than you need. One option may be a “cloud” environment that will allow you to only pay for what you use. This may be the best of both worlds and a lot of providers that host some relatively “heavy” websites use these cloud services.
If you are hosting a simple website and the site itself is not necessarily critical to the services you offer, you can look into a lower cost option that will fit all of your needs. One other consideration is what “site builder” features are available with the hosting company you’re considering using. Do you have enough experience to build your own website? If you had some convenient tools to create a template for you and get a site installed, would this be better for you? Are you the type of person who would rather setup everything on the server? These questions may help you determine what features you should look for when evaluating hosting companies.
The main “feature” that some of the lower cost sites have is that they allow unlimited domains to be hosted along with unlimited emails, unlimited bandwidth, diskspace, etc. These companies are usually a shared hosting platform which means your account is shared with several other “users” on the same physical hardware. This is not a bad thing necessarily and for the price is one of the best options for web hosting, especially for those who don’t have the budget for a full time website administrator. Other features include a cpanel or control panel that allows for easy administration including site installations, email configuration, and domain management.
When evaluating what to go with, if you are new with a business idea and want to get a website setup quickly, the best advice I could give is to go with a good company that has a cpanel and offers a free domain name, then sign up. Don’t wait, don’t over-evaulate, just give it a try. Many of these type of hosting companies also offer a 45-90 day money back guarantee, so don’t take too much time in the analysis phase as most of these companies are very similar and it would take some pretty serious benchmarking tests to determine any real difference. A big factor to influence may be whether or not the company has live support and what they offer. I’ve used both, and it’s always nice to get a good support engineer on the phone or chat with you to resolve issues quickly.
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