Avoid being caught with a “Sorry For Any Inconvenience” (SFAI), staring at you from the monster on your monitor.
Imagine you are very excited about finishing your first website. You upload it to SFAI web hosting service, but to your dismal demise, your website is not showing on your screen.
Your website is your identity and an efficiently working website is extremely necessary step along your road to riches. Choosing a reliable hosting provider is one of your steps towards success.
Whether the reliable hosting provider is the most expensive or the least expensive, it must have all the information documented and in detail Real Estate Printing about their web hosting plans and other related services. Don’t overlook the fact that being the most expensive or the least expensive does not mean the best.
It is worth knowing that there are, also, free web hosting providers. Free web hosting services are suitable for personal web pages, but inadvisable for commercial purposes.
Robert Fritz said, “If you limit your choices only to what seems possible or reasonable, you disconnect yourself from what you truly want, and all that is left is compromise”. Don’t compromise in selecting your reliable hosting provider.
If you are building an e-commerce site, choose a reliable hosting provider that will ensure that your site runs efficiently and can perform the necessary functions to promote your site. You will not receive a guaranteed minimum uptime of 99% or higher with free web hosting. If your web hosting provider’s server goes down, the injurious impact on your business is immeasurable.
What Are The Secrets of Selecting A Reliable Hosting Provider
To compile your list of web hosting providers, you first search for unbiased reviews. Best place to obtain a third party review is to check the latest reviews on forums. A web hosting provider should be a registered company and not an individual; check the BBB (Better Business Bureau).
Now, that you have established your list, gather these important details about each company:
- Has the provider been in business for 3 or more years;
- Is the provider incorporated, have a logo, physical address and phone number (preferably a 1-800 number);
- Does the provider have leading edge technology and works with a professional website designer;
- Does the provider have a reliable server with sufficient back up; that is, it has 24/7 monitoring capable of handling any emergency;
- Does the provider have 24/7 client support both by email and phone;
- Does the provider offer a money back guarantee, especially if you choose to switch companies;
- Does the provider guarantee 99.5% or higher uptime;
- Does the web hosting package offer 2 mega bites of band width or more which is enough for minisites unless you intend on having a lot of downloads of software, audio or video;
- Does the provider offer sufficient disk space; 5 mega bites is ample for a minisite unless you have many pictures, videos or mp3;
- Does the provider offer email accounts; for a mini site 10 is usually enough;
- Does the web hosting package include PHP, Perl, Cgi-bin, SSL, MySQL, and Shopping Cart? If not what is the added monthly cost for these additional programming languages;
- Does the provider offer both Windows 2000 and Linux server? Linux is cheaper and if you are not running Microsoft SQL server database, or Microsoft Active Server pages, then Linux server will almost certainly be fine;
- Does the provider provide multiple domains or sub domains;
- Does the provider offer a free domain;
- Does the provider offer web design tools as well as the right to become an affiliate;
- Does the provider offer various packages and are these packages competitive.