Category: Website management

Deciding on a right web hosting service for your website is one of the most important aspect of website management.

Given that there are thousands of companies on the internet that offers webhosting services, the selecting is not going to be easy. Below are several criteria for selection of web host:

Windows or Linux Hosting.

Generally, a Web site that uses PHP and/or CGI will need to get a Linux hosting plan. If on the other hand, the web site is created for ASP (Active Server Pages) or ASP.NET, it will need a Windows hosting plan. Generally, unless you intend to use ASP or ASP.NET on the website, choosing a Linux webhosting plan will cost lesser in terms of available development tools and hosting fees.

Speed of server

Speed of server determines how fast the website viewer will be able to gain access to your website. A slow website can drive potential visitors away. Nobody likes to wait for 20 seconds for a webpage to appear. “Pinging” is a technique that can be used to check the speed of the web hosting server. The number of sites that is hosted on the server can affect the speed.

Technical Support, Reliability and Uptime

Prompt technical support is an important consideration. One simply cannot afford not to have good and fast technical support. Reliable round the clock technical support will ensure a good uptime of your website. True 24/7/365 technical support can save you a lot of frustrations. It is not good if your visitors come to your web site only to find that it is not accessible. It is best to avoid any web host that does not guarantee a minimum of 99% uptime.

Bandwidth

Bandwidth refers to the amount of data that moves across a network in a given time period such as a month. You will need to decide just how much of bandwidth that your website will most likely recieve monthly eventually. Typically, if your site offers file downloads then you will need considerable more bandwidth than one that does not.

Types of hosting

There are several types of webhost, namely

• shared
• collocated
• unmanaged dedicated
• managed dedicated

You will need to know which type suit your need the best. Shared web hosting service is the most common and economic way of hosting web sites. However, it is really meant for webmasters who do not require very high bandwidth and high performance. The web server used in shared web hosting services host multiple websites on it. The number of websites that are on a shared web hosting can sometimes amount to even hundreds or thousands.

It is always to good idea to find out what other people are saying about any particular webhosts, before deciding on using them. Try to read reviews of these webhost. Naturally, those with less than ideal reviews should be avoided.

Well, these are some of the considerations for choosing a suitable webhost. Hope that it has been useful.

Additional resources:

A website checklist
A useful checklist for effective website management.