Once you’ve decided to start your online business, formulate a strategy of setting up your website for which you’d need to register a domain name and choose a good web hosting service. There are a number of web hosting companies operating in the market today. Hence, you need to play smart and do proper research before choosing a web hosting company for your online business.
The choice of a good web hosting provider is critical as the as the hosting services are an index of the accessibility of your website. A good web hosting service increases your brand value by making your website accessible to the world round the clock. Here are some good web hosting companies such as:
LimeDomains: Latest entrant in web hosting business; owned by Lime Group; One-Click Application Hosting Solution; the first ICANN accredited registrar to include powerful open source applications and a full featured hosting account with every new domain registered or transferred.
GoDaddy: A domain name registrar and web hosting company; sells online business related software and services such as spam-protected e-mail, secure socket layer (SSL) certificates, and Web-site creation tools.; currently the largest ICANN-accredited registrar in the world.
Network Solutions: ample storage, disk space and bandwidth, domain name registration, web hosting & email hosting services, 24 ×7 technical & customer support; until January 2009, more than 6.6 million domain names managed.
There are a number of important factors to be taken into consideration before finalizing a web hosting provider for your online business:
1.) Bandwidth required by your business: Depending upon your activity on your website such as blogging, uploading videos/audio streams etc., you should choose a hosting service. If you want to have an advanced website, ensure that the web hosting service supports programming languages such as Ruby, Perl, PHP, MySQL, CGI etc. Also, make sure that your web hosting company provides some user-friendly programs that would enable you to build your website.
2.) Technical support provided by the web host: This is one of the most important tenets to be considered before choosing a web hosting company for your online enterprise. Most of the operating web hosts claim that they provide round-the-clock technical support services. However, you need to find out whether they offer reliable and instant telephone, web chat and email support. Only after giving due consideration to these solutions offered by the company, you must make your final choice.
3.) Uptime provided by the web host: Again, many web hosts promote themselves by saying that they provider 99% uptime, which means that their servers remain fully operation 24 hours a day. You’ve a great online tool, Host Tracker, through which you can verify if the claim made by the host company is true or fake.
4.) Operating System used by the web host: Some web hosts use Linux while some use Windows or any other OS. However depending upon you business requirements, you need to find out which system is compatible to your website.
5.) Security offered by the company: Figure out whether the web host provides spam filtering or anti-virus protection as this is quite important if you don’t want your website to be spammed or attacked.
6.) Backup servers of the web host: If the web host that you’re looking forward to choose does not offer you back up servers, better look for a new one. So if you don’t wish to lose information and find out whether you need a dedicated or shared host, it’s better to choose a host that owns and operates its own data center.
7.) Terms and conditions of service: Read all the terms and conditions of the service carefully and see if they offer money back guarantee in case you feel dissatisfied with the services of the web host.
Hence, you need to play smart before making a choice of the webhost for your online business. A good web host would always update or notify you in case any problem arises. So, just don’t toil hard to find the cheapest web hosts as your website would suffer due to it in the long run.
