Best Website Hosting - Issues To Consider

A best website hosting service is important for any business moving on to the web. By employing a reputable and trustworthy supplier you ought to have few problems and be able to provide a good quality service to your users, through your web site being available at all times and loading fast. Google are now taking loading speed into account when generating their search results therefore if you will be targeting a high search engine ranking, best website hosting is yet more important.

Business owners should not consider using free or very low-priced hosting providers. There are quite a few website hosting providers that fit the bill (and a lot more that don't) and by searching the internet it is easy to find sites listing their top ten web hosting companies (or similar). Sadly, it is not quite as simple as that since these sites disagree in their views as to the top hosting companies and it is usually difficult to directly compare reviews.

Before looking at any potential hosting companies it is important to have worked out what you want:

Linux or Windows Hosting: This is something your website developers will advise on, if you are having a website created for you. If your site requires a Microsoft environment then you must get a Windows web hosting plan. If you are developing your own site it is most appropriate to go for a Linux package.

Shared, VPS, Dedicated Server Hosting: Best website hosting providers offer a range of services containing more resources, bandwidth, disk space etc. and reduced competition with other customers for these resources. At the outset a standard shared package will be all you need. In this scenario many users have their sites and email on the same server and share the disk space, bandwidth etc.. Good hosting companies will not put too many users on one server.

Speed and Reliability: To provide a high-quality service to your customers and to avoid them going somewhere else it is crucial that your site is always online and loads quickly when requested. It is worthwhile searching for current customer comments/posts on potential suppliers and also checking that there is a guarantee of 99.9%+ availability.

Help and Support: This can be overlooked at the outset but it can be essential if you have a crisis. You should expect to see support provided 24/7 by email and telephone.

Disk Space/Bandwidth: You will see that unlimited disk space and unlimited bandwidth is now commonly advertised. This is really just a marketing attention-grabber as it is clear that the disk capacity in the server is fixed, as is the provider's bandwidth, so the terms and conditions are likely to include some type of limitation. Having said that, these resources will not be an issue for a new website in the near future, and probably never will be, unless it becomes very busy (or makes extensive use of video).

Number of Domains and Databases: The normal sharing plans of many hosting companies restrict these. This is not a problem if you are just interested in having one site because you can always upgrade later on if required.

Price: Whilst this is vital, it is last here because the price difference between the top website hosting companies is not sufficient to outweigh the other factors above. You normally pay a number of months in advance (the more months the less expensive it is per month) but some companies do allow you to pay month to month.