40 Million Web Hosting Providers To Choose From
There is more then 40 Million web hoisting provider to choose from and all of them are thirsty for adding your business to their portfolio, in this
situation how do you identify and distinguish the best from the worse web hosting providers. Below I have highlighted some key point to
Consider When Choosing a Web Hosting Provider.
Security
The security of your website is the most important thing to consider once your site goes live, you should be 100% confident that the
technology that brings your web project to life is of the highest caliber and extremely secure. If you set your website to process customer
details and collect payments via the internet then you should consider a hosting provider who can provide you with a server which has
encryption capabilities and the ability to set up a dedicated secure server if and when requested by you.
Server Space
Before you commit your self to a hosting provider, first consider the amount of disk space you will need to host your website, a reasonable
amount is around 500 MB, to 1 GB disk space, which is sufficient enough for any small business, unless you are planning on running a software
repository or an image gallery or a file sharing website. Web hosting providers offer their customers several hosting packages and many of the
packages comes with un-necessary disk space for a very reasonable price in attempt to out perform their competitors in many cases I found
hosting providers are cutting corners to bring it customers an excellent hosting package which only looks good on paper.
Reliability
The reliability of the hosting provider is crucial. The length of time they have been in business, their percent of uptime, reasonable uptime you
should expect is at least 99.5% and their backup and data retrieval practices and policies. Some hosting providers have multiple data centres,
and some might even give you a choice of where your server will be at. Ideally, the closer the server is to you the better, as file transfers and
interaction with the server will be at faster speeds. This might be a good question to ask the company on the phone call above.
Support
Technical support is something that should definitely be a part of a web hosting plan. Professional web hosting providers offer customers a
support ticket system, this support system track all queries made by you and will automatically notify you via e-mail or SMS when your query
get updated. The support system also give you access to review the status of any tickets you have raised, set priorities and check response
times.
PHP/CGI-Bin
No matter what type of site you are planning on running, chances are you will eventually need to install some type of CGI script. Whether it
be a mailing list management script, contact form processor, or maybe even a fancy credit card processing script, your hosting account will
need to allow you to install and run them. This requires access to a special folder on your server called "CGI-Bin". Some hosting accounts will
only allow you to use "pre-installed" scripts as a security measure. These are scripts that the owners of the company have installed and
configured so that they know that they will work properly and not adversely affect their server's performance. That may be all you need, but
if you have the knowledge, it's always nice to have the ability to install your own scripts and configure them to suit your individual needs. You
should also be sure that the account you choose supports the language in which your scripts are written, such as PHP, Perl, etc.
