Whether you’re looking to change web hosts or you’re starting a site for the first time, you need to find the right host for your requirements. To find out what you need to look for — and what to look out for — take a look at these tips that will help you find a great web hosting provider.
One decision you need to make is whether you want shared or dedicated hosting. If your website has a lot of traffic and is very involved, shared hosting may not be to your advantage and may actually hurt your business. In a case such as this, consider a dedicated host to best meet your needs.
If you have a small to mid-sized company and want to cut hosting costs, you should go with a shared server. If you do not get lots of traffic or do not wish to have control over your server resources, then go with a shared host. Just keep in mind that you will be sharing CPU, disk space, and bandwidth.
If you have been used to the same web host for several months, look at the availability of your website. An availability of 99% or more means your website is accessible all the time. If you notice a lower availability rate, look for a web host that does not encounter as many outages.
You should know that not all web hosting services support Flash plug in. Using Flash on your site allows you to create a more interactive experience for your visitors, for instance with videos, games and new design possibilities. If you are not planning on using Flash, this is not a feature you should worry about.
Using a free web host? Prepare yourself for the idea that your entire site may go away completely. After all, small host companies pop up and then disappear with incredible rapidity. If one of them is in charge of your website, and then the company just goes underground, all of your content can go with it — so back everything up!.
Consider how much downtime the web host will have when looking for one. These downtimes vary from 10% to .000001%. This means that there could be hours of downtime per week or as little as seconds. Select a host with the lowest amount of downtime that you can find.
If you want an affordable and efficient host and do not mind running a blog, subscribe to WordPress. This host has a very efficient plug in that converts PHP pages to HTML and caches them: this means visitors still have access to the cached version of your site in case the server encounters an error.
Finding a solid web hosting provider is of paramount importance for anyone with a website. Don’t disappoint your visitors with the downtime that comes from having an unreliable host. These great ideas will help you sort through the wide variety of web hosts and make a decision that you will be happy with.