Web Hosting? The Inside Story and The Precautionary Measures	Visited: 834 4.5/5.0 (2 votes total) Rate: Select 1 - Terrible 2 - Poor 3 - Average 4 - Good 5 - Outstanding
by Maneet Puri December 06, 2007

Web Hosting is the process of buying some space with a domain name on the internet to develop a website of your own. This is the next step after you buy your domain from a domain service provider. Hosting a website and maintaining it calls for a great deal of responsibilities. Hence, many companies prefer web hosting companies to take care of this part. Broadly classified, there are two different types of web hosting services such as web hosting on the dedicated server and web hosting on share server.

Dedicated Server
If you host your website on a dedicated server, you will get a large volume of space to store data, information, files and so forth. Hosting a dedicated server is also secured as you are not sharing it with any one else. However, it is very expensive and not viable if you are hosting a web for the first time.

Shared Server
Hosting you web on a shared server is very economical as you share a common IP with others. However, there are quite a few problems associated with this. For instance, if you’re any of those who share the IP with you does something illegal or unethical, and then all those who share the server will come under suspicion. Hence, big companies always prefer to host their sites on dedicated servers.

Does Your Web Hosting Service Provider Ensure The Following Aspects

Do not compromise on your web hosting expense. A bad web hosting service provider might give you a nightmare and it might happen that you will spend much more that you have saved by going for a cheap web hosting service. Take a look at the following factors while choosing your web hosting service provider.

Reliability
The service provider should be able ensure that you never have had a downtime. Downtime can literally spell doom for your business and your customers will run away as you will become undependable. Hence, make sure your host is reliable.

Good customer support
A professional and competent back-end team support is very essential to make sure that whenever you have problems they can resolve it soon enough save you from significant losses.

Set up fee
Look for a host that doesn’t take any set up charges.

Backing up files
Your hosting company should be backing files at regular interval to ensure that if you lose your precious information in the event of complete system failure on your server, then you work is saved and restored.

FTP Access
It is really useful to have FTP access in the control panel. However, if you use a third party program for FTP access, it will run much faster. Go for smartFTP.

Email Addresses
Make sure that your hosting company offers a specific number of email addresses in your package. There is no point in going for a package that charges you additionally for email address.

Bandwidth
Know your bandwidth and also amount of downloading from your server. Usually, most packages allow free downloading between 2Gb to 5Gb per month. However, if you go beyond that, you are charged a small fee.

Host connection speed
Make sure your hosting company has a fast connection. You will lose customers if your pages load slowly. More than 50% of the internet users still use dial-up, and hence, your pages should load fast.