Choosing a web hosting service for your domain name is somewhat like choosing your clothes, makeup or hairdresser. It determines how you are presented to the world, and can make or mar you, no matter how good you are otherwise. At the same time you should ensure that the domain web hosting offer is comprehensive and economical.
Your primary purpose in hosting a web site is to attract visitors, hold their attention and convey a message that is usually aimed at increasing your sales. To do this you have to present yourself in the most favorable light and be available and accessible to your visitors. This means that your domain web hosting and domain management should be of top class quality, at least as far as the essentials are concerned.
Managing your domain well involves a number of things like designing your site attractively, having useful and helpful features, providing for easy navigation, easy and constant access to your site, quick loading of pages, and ability to monitor and analyze the traffic.
At the same time you want to keep costs down, which means that you have to consider cheap and free domain web hosting, although you should be cautious with the latter because there may be quite an array of hidden or indirect costs that could affect your site’s performance and appeal. Some domain name web hosting solutions offer a comprehensive but simple package that includes web hosting domain name registration and all related services.
How do you ensure that all of this is being performed satisfactorily? Here are a few essential tips that should help you to ensure that your web hosting service will deliver the type of service you will need to attract and hold traffic to your site.
1. Reliability: Probably one of the most important and fundamental things that you should be looking for in your domain web hosting is reliability. If your site isn’t going to be up all the time, you’re going to lose potential customers that are unsuccessfully trying to reach you. “All the time” may be a tall order for anyone, so we’ll modify it slightly and say “most of the time.” Now, what would “most of the time” translate into? A really good web hosting solution should offer you up to 99.9% up time. You may relax that just a wee bit if the other conditions are extremely favorable. Remember, however, that downtime on your site is going to cost you so heavily that even if you have to pay a little extra to ensure the kind of uptime that we are talking about, it’s definitely worth it. Of course, if you get the same level of service at a lower cost so much the better. In order to ensure reliability your domain web hosting should be supported by someone who has the necessary infrastructure and support facilities in place. These should include adequate backup facilities, and what is known as redundancy. Basically redundancy means that there is more available than what is strictly required. This ensures that when one part of the system fails, the redundant part is able to take over. This may involve using multiple bandwidth providers, communication connections, backup servers, backup power facilities to take over in case of power failure, and so on.
2. Speed: The next important thing is speed. If the visitor is assured of the site availability all the time, but after coming in finds that he/she has to wait for a long time for each page to load or for downloading anything from your site, he/she is likely to give up and go to another site, probably that of your competitor. Speed can be assured only if the domain web hosting solution has enough resources like memory and disk space commensurate with the number of domains being hosted. Some cheap web hosting solutions may be compromising on this, so you need to look at this aspect carefully while considering a cheap solution. Free domain web hosting services are unlikely to provide enough resources for serious applications.
3. Scalability: It is not uncommon to find that a person starts with a certain website, and as business picks up, quickly outgrows that model. This is particularly true when you are just starting out. You should keep in mind the fact that you are not too sure at this stage as to what exactly you are likely to need. All estimates that you make about traffic, bandwidth, disk space and number of domains, are just that – estimates. A clearer picture will emerge only after you’ve been in operation for some time. Even if you are an established player, you cannot afford to discount the importance of scalability in today’s dynamic world. If yours is business that’s growing even modestly, your needs are going to change substantially in the near future. All this means that you should make sure that the solution you have selected is capable of being scaled up as you grow. Your web hosting service should have the resources necessary to cater to your growing requirements at a cost that would continue to be competitive. If you don’t examine both these aspects right at the beginning, you may be in for some painful decisions and costly changes later on.
4. Being Found: One of the important challenges in hosting your website is to ensure that you get noticed. With millions and millions of sites waiting out there for the attention of any potential visitor, this can be a daunting task. See what facilities you can get from the company that supports your domain web hosting. The key to getting noticed is to submit your site to as many search engines as possible and get them to display your site within the initial few pages. Search engine submission itself can involve a lot of effort and time. This in turn could either turn into a costly affair, or take up a lot of your time with possibly unsatisfactory results. All this can be avoided if your host has facilities for submission to major search engines.
5. Site Building: Building and maintaining your site is an important part of your domain management, and unless you can afford to spend a fortune engaging specialized services or waste a lot of your personal time trying to reinvent the wheel, you should look at what support your domain web hosting partner offers you. These could include tools for building and maintaining your site – a kind of DIY(do it yourself) for your site so that you can easily make, modify and manage your site yourself. A good domain web hosting company will be able to give you tools that help you easily build sites ranging from simple informational sites to sites involving fairly advanced levels of complexity including features such as e-business and e-commerce facilities. Look for aids such as wizards or templates that will make the task easier for you. You can not only save a substantial amount of cost this way but also have better control over your site.
6. Multiple Domains: One area that could potentially prove costly to you, if you are planning to host multiple domains from the same site, is the fee structure for multiple domain hosting. There are companies that will charge you for each additional domain, while others will offer you multiple domain operation at a single cost. Usually companies offer various domain name web hosting plans setting a limit to the number of domains that can be hosted under each plan. There are also plans that support hosting of unlimited number of domains. Select the plan that will suit your requirements best, keeping in mind the requirements of the immediate future. Make sure, however, that the domain web hosting service that you are partnering with offers flexible and cost effective options, and preferably includes web hosting domain name registration and hosting services.
7. Domain Names: There are domain names and domain names, and you would like to choose one that suits your requirements. The chosen domain name web hosting solution should help you to select from a wide range of alternative names that are available, supporting international domain names and nation specific extensions. You should also check to see the charges for web hosting domain name registration, as you are interested in optimizing the total cost of your domain name web site. Under multiple package offers and bundled offers, you may also be offered free domain web hosting. If your site is going to be used primarily or in a major way to divert traffic to other sites, you should estimates how many such sites you might want to connect to, and check the domain parking facility offered by your domain web hosting service.
8. Bandwidth: This refers to the amount of data transfer that your site is actually doing. While selecting the domain web hosting solution, you should ensure that the bandwidth offered is fit for your needs. A good domain web hosting service will offer you different plans with varying bandwidths and price tags so that you can choose what suits you best. This way you get what you need and pay for it. Otherwise, you may either end up paying for something that you don’t need or find that what you are offered is too little for your needs and therefore have to pay extra amounts every month for the extra traffic. How do you decide the right bandwidth for your needs? Your bandwidth requirement will depend on the number of visitors that you expect each month, the number of pages that you are hosting, and the size of each page. The size of your web pages may vary quite a lot depending on the type of content that you pack them with. For example, more graphics will mean bigger size of pages. So if you have more graphics and/or expect a heavy traffic, your bandwidth requirement will be higher. While on the subject of bandwidth, there’s one thing that you need to be aware of and cautious about. Some companies offer unlimited bandwidth. This might sound very attractive, but is generally unsustainable. Most companies that offer such a facility will have a less visible set of conditions – the fine print - by which you end up paying much more than you bargained for. As a general rule, learn to look at such offers with suspicion, unless otherwise proved. It is much better and safer to deal with a company that lets you know upfront the kind of bandwidth that you will be getting and the mount you have to pay for it.
9. Disk Space: If your site is like most commercial sites, it is going to be backed up with a database that could contain details of items, customers and a lot of information that would be required in processing the requests of your customers. For example, if you run an online shopping site that deals with specified items, you are going to need a list of items, most probably classified in accordance with some criteria, their prices, available stocks and so on. That’s just for starters. You may have to build up a lot more information and store transaction details as your business expands. All this is going to demand disk space for storage. You should make sure that the disk space that you are likely to need is available to you without extra cost. Again there are usually several plans that offer different amounts of disk space with each having its own rate. Select the plan that fits your requirements best.
10. Web hosting control: Unless yours is the most elementary site giving just a few bits of static information that hardly changes with time, you are going to have to do a bit of maintenance and monitoring of your site. You will need to manage your accounts, manage the files and database, monitor the usage of your bandwidth and disk space, and do a host of other activities to ensure that you are using your resources efficiently and that your site is up to date. The best way to manage your site yourself is to have a control panel that lets you do most of things by the click of your mouse or the pressing of a key. If your domain web hosting service does not provide this facility, you have a choice of opting for a third party tool or sweat it out yourself. Let’s be realistic and count out that last option. The problem with third party tools is that they generally cost you some money. Moreover, there’s no guarantee that all the features will work on your site. If your web hosting solution provides this facility, you get two advantages. First is the cost advantage, because that is included in your total cost. The second is that you get all the services under one roof, so that if you have any problem or difficulty, you don’t have to run after multiple agencies. It naturally makes sense to find out what level of support your web hosting service provides.
11. Email features: It is helpful to have a facility that has a number of POP/IMAP email facility available. Usually the number offered should be sufficient for your needs. Just make sure that you get email accounts within your plan at no extra cost. Check for SPAM and virus control facilities. You’ll need them if you want a hassle free operation.
12. Server Platform and Hardware: Your site is programmed to run on a certain type of server. So the solution that you choose should support the software that you have developed. Otherwise the whole exercise will collapse. Broadly there are two groups of platforms – Windows based and Unix/Linux based. If you have already finalized your software, you should choose the platform accordingly. More often, people start developing their software after they have finalized the web hosting arrangement. In that case, you can select the preferred software platform. Generally speaking, Unix/Linux platforms using Perl or PHP as programming languages and MySQL as the database are emerging as the preferred solutions. This is because these are open source and are free software (free as in a free country and not necessarily as in free lunch). Because of this characteristic, they allow users to develop them, and the features keep growing. Also they are less dependent on proprietary knowledge base. You will have to make the evaluation of which platform you prefer based on your judgment, but keep these considerations while you make a decision.
13. Support: One of the most important things that may not be very obvious when you are just starting out is the level of support that you’re going to get down the line. If you have any problem at all with your site, you should have access to quality support round the clock. If you have problems with the site or the hosting service, it is fairly obvious that without proper support you are going to be in a difficult situation, paying a heavy price through lost customers, sales, goodwill, and confidence. Even this tends to be overlooked because usually people fail to consider this in the beginning. There’s more to support than just ensuring that your site is up and running. You should get technical help and advice with your site, so that the DIY feature makes sense.
14. Guarantee: The proof of the pudding is in the eating. You might have taken all the care in the world, obtained good references and carefully evaluated the service provider, but what happens if you find that it doesn’t suit you after all. Good hosting companies offer money back guarantee within a specified period, which is usually long enough for you to make your assessment. Moreover, the money back guarantee is a sort of quality statement by the hosting company, because if they were not confident of the level of service that they offer, they wouldn’t go around offering money back guarantees.
15. Cost: This often-overlooked factor is as important as any other that we have discussed. When you are considering cost, however, take care to ensure that you are looking at the total cost. For example, some free domain web hosting solutions offer everything absolutely free of cost, but does that mean that is the lowest cost solution? Not necessarily, because you may be actually paying for it in a number of indirect ways. Similarly an apparently cheaper solution may actually cost you more or may not suit your requirements. So you need to look at the total cost of ownership including indirect and hidden costs.
If all that has left you wondering whether it is possible to get these from one company, take heart. There are a few companies that do provide all of this and at a low cost.
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