Finding the Best Web Hosting for Your Online Business, 10 Key Elements of Web Hosting

Finding the Best Web Hosting for Your Online Business: 10 Key Elements of Web
Hosting:

In the quest to find the best web hosting solution, look for Reliability and
Customer Service rather than the Cheapest Price

Finding the best managed hosting solutions is a lot like finding a new car.

Ultimately, your web host needs to get you from point A to point B, but
understanding which features are important to you as a consumer makes the
difference between buying a lemon or a Ferrari. Deciding which are the important
features and components can be a confounding task.
How do you decided on the best web hosting solution for your online business
needs?

examines the key elements of this
important decision, and helps you make the best choice with ease. Let's have a
look under the hood.

The first step in finding the best web hosting solution is understanding your
business needs.

Here are some important questions you should know the answers to in order to
make the right choice:

• What are you going to be doing with your site?
• Will your site have just a few pages?
• Will it offer downloads?
• Is it a database driven? Will you have a mailing list?
• Is your site commerce enabled?
• Who is managing your site?
• Will you need FTP access to upload your files, or will you publish using FrontPage(TM)?

Once you know the answers to those questions, start to examine these 10 key
elements of web hosting:

1) Customer Service: Top of the List! Can you reach the web hosting support
desk easily and are they responsive? Try it before you buy it! Regardless of
your technical skills, in most cases you will need to communicate with your web
hosting provider. Find a company that is reachable and responsive to your
requests. It's always a good idea to make sure the hosting provider has a Toll
Free 800 number, and that they actually answer their calls. Before you sign up
with anyone, pick up the phone and call them. One tip to remember, the sales
group almost always picks up the phone, so call the technical support number and
try to talk with them. Try calling at odd hours, and see what you get. This is
always a good way to gauge how easy it is to get them on the phone, and if they
are the right web hosting provider for you.

2) Reliability: Are the servers that host your business up? Are you
guaranteed server uptime as part of your hosting agreement? How long have they
been in business? Most good hosting groups guarantee a certain amount of "up
time" with your contract. In addition, some companies charge more for better "up
time" guarantees. For example: the $5.95 per month package delivers 95% uptime,
while the $9.99 per month package delivers 99.9% uptime. Higher monthly fees may
put you on a better network. Something to consider when you're pricing potential
hosting providers, or if your thinking about free web hosting.

3) Control Panel: The heart of a websites features and the place where you
control many of the features needed to run a proper website. With a good control
panel, you can Block IP Addresses from Accessing your Site, Password Protect
Directories, Prevent Image HotLinking, Prevent Bandwidth Leeching and much more.
Cpanel is an awesome control panel package that is intuitive, and really easy to
use. Many managed hosting solutions utilize it. I host several sites with
hostgator based on the fact that they have Cpanel.

4) Disk Space: How much storage capacity do you require? If your going to
load the server up with MP3's and large files, be aware of the Disk Space
limitations. If you know your going to use a lot of disk space, that needs to
play a factor in your decision.

5) Bandwidth: The amount data that you broadcast from your website on a
monthly basis. Most packages allow you to upgrade if you need more.

6) Domains: Do you need a single domain name, sub-domains or unlimited
domain hosting. Domain Management includes tasks like Managing Subdomains,
Parked Domains and Redirect URLs. With good Domain management, you can put
several domain names under one URL, but your web hosting provider must offer
these features.

7) Web Statistics: Full statistical analysis of your site lets you
understand your traffic, what keywords are used to find our site, as well as
browser types, country visitors are from, which pages they visited and much
more. With good statistical analysis programs, you should also be able to view
Raw Access Logs for your Site, Disk Usage, Bandwidth Usage, Web Traffic
Statistics, Error Logs and visitors demographics.

8) Email hosting: Email is always a crucial part of running a website. You
will need the ability to create proper business email addresses. Auto responder,
POP3 & Mail Forwarding is a must. Email management can be easy if you have the
right tools. At a minimum, you will want to have control over adding and
removing Email Accounts, Setting Disk Space Quotas, Read and send mail through
Web mail Interface, Manage Email Forwarders and Auto-responders, as well as
Email Domain Forwarding. Make sure you have this type of control over your
email, or you will be at the mercy of the person who is. If you have never done
these types of email management tasks, don't worry, it is a lot easier than it
all sounds.

9) Costs: How much will you pay per month? Are there additional fees for
going over the bandwidth limits? Most web hosting packages range from $4.95 to
$9.95 per month, and provide all the services you will need for a basic website.
This is a buyers market, and there are many great choices out there. But pricing
should not be the determining factor in your choice. It is a good idea
understand the bonuses that many of these hosts provide. One of my favorite
freebees is a $25 Google AdWords Credit. Gate.com currently offers this AdWords
Credit. With a free $25 AdWords Credit, you can promote your site and experiment
with Pay Per Click Advertising. Well worth the effort.

Looking for Free Web Hosting? Remember the old adage "there is no such thing as
a free lunch." The is also no such thing as free web hosting. If you are serious
about your online business, free web hosting is not an real option. Free Web
Hosting costs a lot more than you think. I recently tried a "free web hosting"
deal with one of the major domain companies. They included a fun little pop
under advertising window for all of my visitors, and at the same time, made it
impossible for me to promote my site via Google AdWords, as Google would not let
me advertise due to their policy against annoying pop-under ads. So, "Free Web
Hosting" comes at a high price, don't pay it.

10) Advanced Hosting Features: If your looking to build a modern website,
you need some advanced tools to make that happen. Look for features such as
MySQL and phpMyAdmin, PostgreSQL and phpPgAdmin, PHP, Perl, CGI, Python and
Tomcat. If you are new to web hosting, you probably won't need all these
features. Some hosting packages come with serious extras including Shopping
Carts, Guestbooks, Image Galleries, Forums and Wiki's, Blogs, Counters, Clocks,
chatrooms and more.

As a web consultant for over 10 years, I have seen all kinds of hosting
scenarios; free web hosting, the classic "$9.99 per month" packages, to server
farms run by in house system administrators. The majority of web hosting
shoppers are looking for the same thing, a web hosting solution that is
reliable, inexpensive and easy to manage.

Managed hosting solutions have evolved over the years. Many of the smaller
mom-and-pop shops have dropped off, and a new pack of web hosting provides now
offer comprehensive hosting plans that get the job done. 

rates several of today's top hosing providers, and has selected 7 of the
industries top hosing providers for you. You can't really go wrong with any of
these top 7 groups. There are however, a few elements that separate the top
selections in our list. Even with all the advancements in server technology over
the last 10 years, the basic elements of finding the best web hosting providers
remain the same; you need to find a managed hosting solution that can provide
Technical Reliability and Outstanding Customer Service.

 

 

Web Hosting Strategy for Managing Multiple Websites

If you are making a comfortable living from the Internet and the Web or have a plan to achieve that goal, it's likely that you are running more than ten websites. The websites are your virtual offices. You want to your sites to be up and running 365 days, 7 days a week and 24 hours a day. Managing multiple websites is a daunting task if running one website is a hobby.

Proposed Hosting Strategy for Managing Multiple Websites

The hosting strategy we propose is to host your multiple major websites with 3-4 different hosting companies, and open a reseller account with another hosting company for 1) small and new websites, 2) web development and 3) backup. Hosting with too many hosting companies will significantly increase the time and the difficulty of managing sites, and using a single hosting company isn't a smart choice either.

Justification of the Hosting Strategy

Cost - Cost of the Web hosting isn't an issue for running a single web site whether it costs $5 or $25 a month. The difference is only a few hundred dollars or less a year. It's always nice and smart to get the most out of every single dollar in doing business. At least, a few hundred dollars difference wouldn't make or break a business. If you run 10 or even 50 websites, the cost of Web hosting alone will define the success or failure of your online adventure. To cut the hosting cost, the option is to use a reseller hosting account to host as many small or new sites as you want for about $15 a month. You host one or 2 major websites with one hosting company. Shared hosting account costs under $10 a month, and dedicated server will cost $50 or more a month.

Uptime - If your bread-and-butter maker website is down for a few hours, you'll lose hundreds of dollars and more. Even though most hosting companies promise 99.9% uptime, it's not common to see a website down for a few hours. A site could be down for a half day or even more if a hosting company is doing a major update. The hosting company may do the update in a weekend or a major holiday, but that's when many family-oriented and travel sites generate their revenues. If you could afford the loss of revenues, many websites owners can't bear the psychological loss and pressure. Hosting your sites with a few hosting companies will reduce the risk of downtime.

Application Development - For simple web application, webmasters will do development on the same production hosting site. If your ecommerce applications are complex, doing development on the production site may bring down the live site especially if you're in the process of changing configuration files or install customized applications. The option is setup a website on your reseller account for development and testing, and move the applications to production account on another server after the completion.

Backup - If you're not happy with a hosting company, a hosting company is out of business, or the servers will be down for a day or two, you can easily temporarily or permanently switch from one hosting company to other since you're familiar with the site managing tools already. If you have a backup or secondary copy running on another server, all you need for the switch is the transfer of the domain, which will take no more than a minute.

Shop Before You Buy

There're too many hosting plans to choose from a large number of hosting companies - ASP Web Hosting, Budget Hosting, Dedicated Servers, eCommerce Hosting, FrontPage Web Hosting, Hosting With Templates, Managed Web Hosting, PHP Web Hosting, Reseller Hosting, Shared Hosting, Unix / Linux Hosting, Virtual Private Servers, Windows Hosting or Co-location Hosting. Compare the cost, hosting features, tracking records of hosting companies before making your commitment. Good luck with your online adventures.