What's in a hosting company?
Many people ask a lot questions when they first start a website. Things like what it should look like, who should they go to for it to be designed, how do they get things up and running? All very good questions, the basics for getting a website setup on the Internet contain:
I'm going to focus on the third item.
Hosting is tough to choose from these days. There are TONS of people out there that are willing to give you a piece of their server to put your site up on and have you pay for it. There are many services out there that are free, or cheap. Yet, what people don't realize is that if you don't know what to look for, you could be caught off guard and wind up paying dearly in the end.
Doing a simple search on the Internet for hosting companies will bring up quite a few results. (10,800,000 as of this post)
What's the best one? What should you be looking for? The answer lies in you.
What's your budget? How much are you willing to spend on hosting per month and how much do you plan on doing to maintain the site? Hosts are more than willing to drop the pricing for you, IF you are willing to do some of the leg work yourself. If you want to make sure you back up your site regularly, then you can save some dough on some hosts. If you plan on making sure that you don't need any kind of extras like email accounts or lots of bandwidth, they will cheapen the price.
The problem is that many people don't know for sure what they need and thus they jump into a cheap hosting account and don't realize that as they need to grow their site to be able to account for their business, the host takes them to the cleaners. If you don't know what you're looking for or need, I would suggest you speak with your designer or someone in IT that would have a general idea of what you are trying to do.
Having an overall idea or attack plan to your site will help better maintain your expectations when setting up a site. Make sure you have an idea of what you are offering on your site, things like movies are large in bandwidth usage, so a site package at 500mb a month probably won't work for you. Make sure you have all you need in the setup, like email ability on the server to allow you to send email from the site if you have any automated forms.
Getting a good overall knowledge of your site and its functions will make finding a host that much easier in the long run and help you to control the cost as well. Look for a host that offers you a good blend of what you need, both services and assistance. Too much of either one and you will probably pay out the nose to get the other.
- Buy The Domain Name
- Get A Site Designed
- Determine Who's Going To Host The Site
- Push Your New Site Up To The Hosting Server
I'm going to focus on the third item.
Hosting is tough to choose from these days. There are TONS of people out there that are willing to give you a piece of their server to put your site up on and have you pay for it. There are many services out there that are free, or cheap. Yet, what people don't realize is that if you don't know what to look for, you could be caught off guard and wind up paying dearly in the end.
Doing a simple search on the Internet for hosting companies will bring up quite a few results. (10,800,000 as of this post)
What's the best one? What should you be looking for? The answer lies in you.
What's your budget? How much are you willing to spend on hosting per month and how much do you plan on doing to maintain the site? Hosts are more than willing to drop the pricing for you, IF you are willing to do some of the leg work yourself. If you want to make sure you back up your site regularly, then you can save some dough on some hosts. If you plan on making sure that you don't need any kind of extras like email accounts or lots of bandwidth, they will cheapen the price.
The problem is that many people don't know for sure what they need and thus they jump into a cheap hosting account and don't realize that as they need to grow their site to be able to account for their business, the host takes them to the cleaners. If you don't know what you're looking for or need, I would suggest you speak with your designer or someone in IT that would have a general idea of what you are trying to do.
Having an overall idea or attack plan to your site will help better maintain your expectations when setting up a site. Make sure you have an idea of what you are offering on your site, things like movies are large in bandwidth usage, so a site package at 500mb a month probably won't work for you. Make sure you have all you need in the setup, like email ability on the server to allow you to send email from the site if you have any automated forms.
Getting a good overall knowledge of your site and its functions will make finding a host that much easier in the long run and help you to control the cost as well. Look for a host that offers you a good blend of what you need, both services and assistance. Too much of either one and you will probably pay out the nose to get the other.
Post made: Fri, Jan 18 2008 - 10:42 AM
Category: FAQ
Tags: Hosting | Company Site | Small Business Questions |
jammarlibre Says:
Great Site - really useful information!l
Thu, Dec 4 2008 - 00:10 AM