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So you think you want to start up a website.  Prior posts from me were about domain name choice and website creation.  Which brings the subject of hosting into play:  Early on in your decision making process, you will want to shop for a hosting plan.

The next step after creating your website is to make it live on the internet, or publish it.  To have your website seen on the internet you will need to choose a hosting plan.  A hosting plan is different from a domain name.  You own your domain name but you rent a hosting plan.  In it’s simplest terms a hosting plan is paying a company to broadcast your website onto the internet.  The key considerations for choosing a good hosting plan will be discussed here.

SERVICE  The number one thing to look for in a hosting plan is service.  Bells and whistles and fancy features will do you no good if you can’t get customer service in a timely fashion.  After you have published, or “gone live” on the internet, the last thing you want is for the website to go down and become unavailable to potential customers.  For that reason you want to be sure and choose a hosting provider that will provide the best uptime as well the best availability and quality of customer service.

UPTIME  When shopping for a hosting company, find out if they have an 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 at all possible, choose a host guaranteeing up to 99.9% uptime.

SIZE  How large will the website be?  The amount of disk space all of your website’s pages takes up will determine the size of the hosting plan you will need.  If your website will be media rich with videos or music or photo files, or a large e-commerce site with a lot of catalogue pages, you will have to take space into consideration as a criteria for choosing the right hosting plan.

LINUX OR WINDOWS  This question refers to the operating systems available for hosting and which one to choose.  BTW it does not matter what operating system you are using on your personal computer.  The determining factor here is what programming language was used to design the website.  For example, if CGI or PHP programming language was used, the best choice for the hosting operating system would be Linux.  For a website designed with ASP, the best choice would be Windows.  For the novice user who is building a simple html 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?  Most hosting providers sell their hosting plans on a sliding scale according to bandwith usage.  Obviously more bandwidth is better because it allows more visitors to visit your site, but at the beginning this will be hard for you to gauge.  Usually the best way to proceed here is to start with a basic low bandwidth plan, and upgrade later as the traffic begins to flow to the website.

SHARED OR DEDICATED HOSTING  The question of shared vs. dedicated hosting is really answered in a very simple way:  First a brief description of shared hosting, which is sharing space on a server with dozens or perhaps hundreds of other websites.  The main factor here is that you will have no control over the operating system, database structure, etc., and will have to work within the structure setup by the hosting provider.  Dedicated or virtual dedicated hosting is different in the sense that you will have full control over the environment that your website resides in, and you will have the only access to that space.  Dedicated server hosting gives you full control over setup of the operating system and auxilliary programs such as database management or shopping cart or database management software.  This type of hosting is definitely geared to the more advanced user, and usually you won’t be able to get as much customer support because it will be a custom setup.  The bottom line:  start off with shared hosting if you are a beginner, until you are advanced enough to progress to your own controlled dedicated hosting environment.

At StartYourWebsiteToday.com our uptime guarantee is 99.9% and we offer 24/7 customer service.  We also have a selection of shared, dedicated, and virtual dedicated hosting plans to suit all budgets and sizes and types of websites. To see what is available, click HERE: Hosting plans.