Windows Web Hosting: How Do You Choose?

There are virtually thousands of windows web hosting companies online today. Most of the time in order to choose the right one, we must depend on word of mouth, popular suggestions or articles like this!

For review, a Windows web hosting company is a provider that supports a Windows Operating System, mostly used for ASP coding language. It’s always best to get the techno jargon out of the way before beginning.

You finally got a website! Welcome to the World Wide Web! Now it’s time to decide on a web hosting company. First, if you have a small website dedicated to something more personal, like a blog, a hobby or just something for family and close friends – you may want to consider free web hosting.

With that in mind, we can pretty much guess your next question.

Why would I even consider paying if free windows hosting is an option? A great point and here’s why – free web hosting companies make their money from supported ads. Therefore, if you choose free hosting, your site will be bombarded with outside advertising. But, like we said – if your site is more personal in nature, free hosting is a great choice. You might even want to consider becoming an affiliate or signing up with Google Adsense.

But, if you finally got a business website up and running and you’re revving up to make some cash through your own product or service, paying for hosting is a must. Before choosing the first web hosting company you search for, here is a simple list of questions you should ask.

Can the host provider meet all technical requirements?
Here are some important terms to remember: storage space and monthly bandwidth. You need to make sure your hosting company can handle the complexities of your site. This is especially important if you are running an e-commerce site and have many products. Ask about costs, and what would happen if you went over your monthly allotment of storage.

Does the Web Hosting Company offer E-commerce solutions?
This question can be blended in with the first one. If your business sells product online, e-commerce capabilities is an important factor when choosing a host company. Even if you currently do not operate an online store, you may change your mind in the future.

Does the company offer tracking statistics?
Reporting is an important tool when you run a site. You need to fully understand conversions and keep track of your visitors. You want to be able to manipulate the tracking yourself and of course run it yourself.

Can you upload any changes yourself?
Another great term to remember is WYSIWYG – this stands for ‘What you see is what you get’. You must be able to make content changes yourself. Paying someone from the hosting company can be costly and in most cases you can wait forever for the changes to take effect.

Is there a spam-filtering service included?
Ask if this is included in your hosting fees or if they cost extra.

Uptime Guarantee
If by some chance your website is down, it might as well not have existed at all! The web host provider you choose must have minimal down-time. Most great hosting companies will make sure to do maintenance well after hours.

Customer Support
Choose a company that gets back to you within the same day...24 hours at most. Even better, some hosting companies have live chat, or 24 hour customer support lines.

Covering the Costs
Web hosting should be reasonable and not cost you an arm and a leg. Look for the deals they offer. In some cases they let you pay monthly or try to give you a discount for one year. Take all the discounts you can get!

In conclusion, you really want to make sure your windows web hosting company grows with your business. You can’t have a hosting company dragging down your site by not offering advanced solutions. At the end of the day this is your business and some investments must be made to make it work.

Planethippo: Affordable web hosting services from UK web hosting company - www.planethippo.com. We also offer Email hosting, Cloud server hosting, Linux hosting, Windows web hosting and many other services.