Choosing a Hosting Plan

It is very frustrating to type in the url of your new web site only to find that the pages loads very slowly or not at all. Maybe even worse, if you're using your site for any type of online marketing, a slow- or no- loading web site will drive customers away if they even get there in the first place. Because of this, I think that reliability is the most important consideration when choosing a Web Hosting company. After all, it doesn't matter how cheap your hosting plan is - even if it's free - if people can't get to your site or it is down all the time. Fortunately, there are quality hosting companies that offer affordable hosting plans. I think the key is to go with a larger company that has been around for awhile. Things seem to happen so fast in Internet time, and I think a company that provides poor service won't last very long. If a hosting company has been around awhile, chances are it's because they provide at least an acceptable level of service. Also, the larger companies are more likely to have a larger server farm (better redundancy), more staff (better support), and more connections (better bandwidth).

Chances are there isn't a web hosting company in your city. What I mean though is keeping it on the same continent. This is both for language and time issues. For example, a person from China might have difficulty getting tech support from a hosting company in the United States because there probably not many hosting companies in the US that have Chinese speaking support staff.

Many hosting companies will try to temp you with "easy to install" preconfigured applications (Drupal, Wordpress, etc) that you can install just by clicking the mouse a few times. For example, Godaddy has a proprietary installer, while some other hosting companies use a program called Fantastico. While all of this looks glitzy and may make it seem easier to build your web site, you shouldn't be using them to install applications on your web site. Why not? Two reasons. First of all, the preconfigured version of the software may not be the latest version available. Web applications like Drupal and Wordpress are frequently updated to fix bugs and plug security holes. If you're not running the latest version of the software, you're exposing your site to an unnecessary risk of being hacked.

When you're first starting out, one thing you don't want to do is get locked into a hosting plan that doesn't work for you. Although it's becoming more rare, some hosting companies require you to sign up for a year at a time. Please don't waste your time and money if you happen to come across one of these companies. There are plenty of good hosting companies that will let you sign up for on a monthly basis. This "trial period" is very important for you, to see if the hosting company clicks with you. For example, I have some friends who swear by Hostgator. I've tried them though, and while their reliability and customer service seem to be excellent, I can't stand their web interface (they use cpanel). On the other hand, a lot of these same friends swear AT Godaddy, but my experience hosting with them has been very good.