You are starting your own website. It’s an exciting time. Whether you are just making a personal site to share yourself with the world or you’re starting a site for your small business to help you expand into the future, finding small business web hosting that offers the features you need at a price you like is essential. Luckily, there are a lot of specific areas you can look at to guarantee that you get a host that works for you. As with all products, marketing departments do a lot to attract business even when what they say and do isn’t in the best interest of the customer. Look at the specific features offered so that you are prepared and satisfied with your choice.
- The number one area you’ll want to closely examine is the price and features, as this is often what you really care about. Don’t just look for the webhosting that offers the cheapest price and jump right in. Look at what the features they offer include, such as customer support, tutorials to help you get started, disk space and bandwidth, and everything else. If you are just doing a little personal site, then you may be able to get away with a very inexpensive option. You can probably just get away with very basic features and a very low cost. If you are planning on a site that is more than that, don’t let the attractiveness of a low price attract you to a webhost that can’t handle your needs.
- Disk space and bandwidth is another really important feature you have to look at. For a small site that will maybe have a few pictures which will only be shared with friends and family, you won’t need very much storage or bandwidth allowances. However, if you are starting a site for a business that will get a significant amount of traffic or plan on transferring large amounts of data, you need to make sure that the host and the service package you choose can support that. One of the most frustrating things possible for a new site owner is to have the site become unavailable because you went over your limitations.
- The third crucial thing to look for in web hosting is how reliable and fast their servers are. Some of the less impressive hosts have a lot of trouble keeping their servers, and your site, up, which is time you paid being wasted. As a business, this can cost you customers and money, and even for a personal site it can be very frustrating. You want to make sure the site has at least 99% to 99.5% uptime. Also, make sure that their servers are actually fast enough for visitors to your site to download the content in a reasonable amount of time.
While there are certainly other aspects of web hosting that you should investigate before choosing one, if you get these three worked out you’ll be well on your way to making a site that you can be proud of.
