Cheap Hosting – Secrets You Will Want To Know
There are several critical steps for you to make the correct choice for cheap web hosting. Leaving out a step will cause untold difficulties down the road for you, so follow the strategies closely.
Choose Carefully
Cost is, by far, not the most important consideration. Reliability is. The dirty little tactic among hosting companies is that once they acquire you, they have you. It is a huge hassle for you to move to another provider. So you will want to get it right the first time. Avoid free sites. Do you really want competing ads on your small business pages? Would you like your business constrained by small allocated disk space and bandwidth? If you can not manage to pay for the incredibly low web hosting costs these days, then you have a hobby, not a business.
So how do you verify reliability? The same way you would for any other purchase. You do detective work and test. Do a Google search for website forums. You will uncover a lot of posters with clear solid opinions. Invest an hour and a half reading these posts and you will Uncover a solid base of recommended host companies.
When you have 5 or so potential candidates, it is time to test. Contact their customer service. Check their live support. Time it. Send them a message. If they do not answer quickly now, you can bet that when you have a problem, they will be impossible to reach. You will want to find out about both web server reliability and mail server reliability.
Know What You Are Going To Need
Do you have big plans for your online enterprise? It is better to pick a web host grow accordingly. Two important measures are disk space and bandwidth. If you will host video or expect monster traffic, then bandwidth is key. If you will have thousands of jpg files, disk space is key. Other considerations are what cutting edge applications are included. Ask your friendly web expert buddy if you are likely to ever need such things like Ruby on Rails or Fantastico.
Must Haves
You will want to have these additional features from your small business web host. You will want a useful interface. Cpanel is typical. Beware of highly specialized interfaces. It will mean a steep learning curve for someone. You will want guaranteed up-time in excess of 99%. A lot of companies, nowadays, are promising 100% up-time, but their risk is low. A 1 day payback for a $7.95 monthly fee pales in comparison to you losing $1000 in orders because your website was down. Read those forums to learn from others experience! Do insist on daily backups and 24/7 free customer service. Check the fine print for sneaky support charges.
Selecting the correct small business web host is not that difficult, but you do want to spend half a day to make the right choice. Do the investigation, anticipate what you will want in the future as well as right now, and insist on key features. You may even want to become a reseller. Do the math. If you could sell $7.95 a month small business web hosting for 100 people, that is about $10 grand a year. Now you know why there are so many cheap hosts around and why it is confusing trying to select the correct one.
–
About the Author:
Looking for guidance on how to pick the right website host? My video, “The Top 5 Things You Need To Know to Pick the Right Website Host” may help. Take a look… Cheap Host How-To Video.
Article Source
