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If you want to have an online business and you’re just starting out, you need to know what to go for and what to avoid when choosing a reliable web hosting company. Sometimes the category of “what to avoid” is the more important category. Perhaps you can learn from a few web hosting nightmares culled from various Internet sites.
Lesson 1: Beware of cheap web hosting if you are running a business.If you are putting up a hobby site or a personal site as a labor of love, then inexpensive or even free web hosting may work fine. It should go without saying that if you try this, you should make sure that all the content on your computer is backed up regularly and often. Some of the problems with free or rock-bottom priced web hosting aren’t apparent. Usually, they’ll give you plenty of disk space and offer you several email accounts. All of that is very nice. But it isn’t easy for hosting companies to cut their hardware costs. The place they often cut corners instead is user support. If you are using a shared hosting service – which is likely with inexpensive providers – you are sharing server hardware with many other sites. If the “walls” between these sites are not stout and high enough, then a crash on one site could affect others on the server. This means that if the blog sharing a server with you suddenly becomes famous because of some newsworthy happening, that one bandwidth hog can bring down or drastically slow down other sites on the server. This may not be a problem if your website is a personal one that can stand some downtime. But if your site hosts an online business, you can’t afford to have any downtime. You need exceptional technical support, and many times the free or low budget sites don’t have it. However, spending more on a hosting service doesn’t necessarily guarantee a good experience. Pricier hosts have been known to drop the ball, too. Some hosts will register “your” domain name under their purview, not yours. If this happens, and you need or want to move your domain to another host, you may be in for a difficult time. This setup is similar to a hosting company holding your domain name hostage. Make sure up front that your domain name is registered in your name, not the hosting company’s. Here are four other dos and don’ts for choosing your first web hosting company. 1. Never sign up with a hosting company that doesn’t offer 24/7/365 user support. This is something you should never compromise on. It is important that your idea of 24/7/365 matches theirs. Do they mean that if you call at midnight on during a holiday weekend a live person will available at the server facility to diagnose and fix your problem? Or do they mean that someone, somewhere will answer phone calls at any time, and they’ll get back to you during business hours? If you have a business web site, then downtime is money not going into your bank account: you can’t afford for your site to be down for any length of time. Go with a place that guarantees 99.8% uptime and that has real, human 24/7/365 support services. 2. Before signing on the dotted line, contact a few of this company’s current customers and ask about their experiences with the host. These need to be customers you have found, not ones that the host company hooks you up with. You need an honest evaluation. Sometimes hosts have user forums that you can read through, and these can give you valuable information. You should know that any hosting company that has been in business for at least a few years will have some negative feedback. Don’t take the one or two rants on a user forum as gospel. Look for a pattern of bad experiences, and if you find it, look elsewhere for a host. 3. Peering and Mirroring: learn them, know them, live them. Peering means that a host has multiple “backbones” coordinated so that when one server line slows beyond a certain amount, the server is automatically switched to the fastest line out. Think of this as someone at your grocery store seeing that your line is slow, and motioning you over to a faster one so you can get out faster. Mirroring means that there are several servers at different locations. These servers serve not only as backups, but enhance accessibility and make your user’s experience with your site faster no matter where they’re from. 4. Even if your hosting company has a good reputation for backups, keep your own backup. Keep fresh copies of your hard drive, plus weekly or monthly copies on a zip drive or an external hard disk. It’s a pain, but you never know when you might need this, and if you don’t have it, you’ll have plenty of heartache trying to get everything up and running well again if your host’s backups turn out to be less than optimal.
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