There are tons of hosting companies out there that claim to offer free or cheap web site hosting, but many of them have hidden fees or low quality services. A supposedly affordable web site hosting plan can quickly turn into a costly nightmare if you aren't careful.
If you are looking for cheap web site hosting, then you will obviously need to compare the costs that are charged by different hosting companies. Some hosting companies will offer all of these features in their basic or most affordable web site hosting plan, and others will not. Some cheap web site hosting companies provide additional services such as domain name registration and web building tools.
Some hosting companies who offer an affordable web hosting plan have one major downfall: they aren't always reliable.
To start with the first thing- the Web Hosts. A Web Hosting Provider is a group that provides you with server space on the web for your web site. The web host is the link between the browser and your website.
You can find a number of free web hosting providers and services on the internet. However, if in case you are planning to create a website with a business purpose in mind, then go for professionals web hosting providers instead of the free web hosting services.
Apart from selecting your web hosting provider, a domain name is as important to select.
Hosting a website means to store and maintain a computer folder of various web pages. Hosting companies offer this service by providing computer hardware and software services.
* Up Time – Dependability of the hosting servers from crashing.
* Support – 24 hours support to handle problems.
* Hosting Company – History and track record for support. This helps to determine the size and amount of storage you’ll need for your hosted website.
* How many web pages will I need? This also helps to determine the size of space needed for your hosting package.
* Do I want Internet Traffic to my Website?
Once your website has been created, it is time to make it go live on the internet. In order to do so, you will need a hosting plan. A hosting plan is different from a domain name. You own your domain name but you rent a hosting plan. A hosting plan in it’s simplest terms is paying a company to broadcast your website onto the internet. This article covers what to look for in a hosting plan.
SERVICE The number one thing to look for in a hosting plan is service. It does not matter that a multitude of features are offered or if the price is low if the service you will be getting with your hosting plan is sub par or even worse, nonexistent. Once your website is live on the internet you will want it to be up all the time. Therefore should a problem occur it is important to select a hosting provider that is readily available and will resolve the issue in as timely a manner as possible.
UPTIME What is the hosting company's "uptime guarantee". Many guarantee 99% uptime for their servers. That sounds great, but it does mean that your site could go down for 1% of the time, which means over 7 hours out of each month! If you can, choose a host guaranteeing 99.9 uptime.
SIZE How large is your site? Most sites do not require much space but if you're planning on having a large site with a lot of multimedia content or an ecommerce site selling multiple items, you'll probably need additional disk space.
DESIGN How was your Web site designed? For example, if you designed a website using ASP or ASP.NET, you'll need to find a Windows hosting plan. If you have a Web site that uses CGI or PHP, you'll need to get a Linux hosting plan. For the novice user who is building a simple website the above may not be a consideration at first, but may become important later on as you become more experienced and add more features to your website.
TRAFFIC How much traffic or how many visitors do you expect monthly? The more visitors or traffic you expect on your site, the higher the bandwidth you will need.