The appearance of the site of a commercial company can greatly influence its actual or prospective customers. An informative content and user-friendly structure, not to mention rapid accessibility of the site can attract customers and recommendations thus widening the consumer market. All of these aspects are the essential points covered by the hosting plan and the web hosting company chosen to sustain the website. Of course, your provider will take care of many other side-aspects, insofar as you have secured an operative collaboration with a reliable provider.

The thousands of web hosting providers that exist today may be confusing. The process of selection of the appropriate hosting company can be time-consuming and tiring. An organized approach would start by asking for recommendations from friends who already have properly working web pages. Even so, thorough research is a necessity, in order to be able to compare the services of the hosting provider to the estimated requirements of the web page.

Before choosing a web hosting company, you need to comply with a number of supplementary requirements: register for a domain name (it is better not to register with the hosting company you plan on working with), design the website or evaluate the requirements and set the budget. Concerning website design, there are three available methods: either do it yourself (if you have the appropriate training), choose from a series of templates offered by some hosting companies or hire a trained specialist.

If you cannot obtain a recommendation, it is not suitable to appeal to the large, renowned companies. You may find that smaller companies have more time to respond to customers requests. You can test this very easily by sending a request to the technical support and observing the time of reply. You will find that online support is faster than fax or telephone.

Next, you should get some technical information such as the number of domains admitted, the bandwidth volume, and uptime percentage. Concerning the volume of bandwidth, verify what the offer is from the beginning and how much you have to pay if you go over certain volumes of downloads per month. In addition, keep in mind that a respectable web hosting provider should offer reliable guarantees (such as money back) when stating their uptime percentage – in this manner, you may be certain you have started your efforts on the right foot.

Another step is to review the compatibility of your files and applications with the software and services offered by the host. Check if easy-to-use control panel is available, for uploading your data. To what concerns more liberal hosting plans – such as dedicated server or collocation center – such problems shouldn’t arise, because the customer only controls the design of the website. Also, review the cost, and consider that monthly payment is one generally recommended approach, especially in the beginning.

Using the website’s requirements as a starting point, objective selection criteria should be your guide in filtering through the vast diversity of hosting providers available. In this manner, choosing a web hosting provider for your company’s website can be a pleasant activity, even for those with little experience.

You can find more information on hosting a website, together with links to official sites of web hosting companies, here, on guide-to-web-hosting.com.

Article Source: http://www.thearticleinsiders.com

A client of mine paid for a solo advert to promote his website in the newsletter I publish at e-bizministry about two months ago. As I was about to send his advert to my list, he called me up on phone and told me not to send it yet. Naturally, I asked him why. His reply shocked me out of my wits.

He said he had just discovered that his website had disappeared from the net. He even said the same thing had happened to the same website earlier in the year when it disappeared in January only to reappear for just one week in May. I could not help but laugh because I knew his problem. He had made a wrong choice of web host.

Your choice of web host can either promote your business or ruin your business. You have to be very careful when choosing your web host or you will be consistently losing up to 80% of your income due to your web host’s inefficiency.

Here are a few quick tips on how to know which web host is reliable, affordable and right for your website.

1. Check if the web host has a web presence. Face it, if a company claims to be a web host and they don’t have a functional website of their own, then they have no business hosting other people’s websites. Any web host you will use must have a functional website where you can check for domain availability, get support and order for their hosting services.

Additionally, you should conduct random checks on their website. If you visit their site randomly ten times and the site is not available more than once in those ten times, forget about that company except you want your own website too to be unavailable almost all the time.

2. Any web host you will use must have an appreciable level of relevant experience. A minimum of a full year of operation. A new web host will only experiment with your website and the result may not be good for your business. Visit the web host’s website and read about them. If they don’t talk about their experience, then they don’t have it. Just leave them alone.

3. Look out for their present clients’ testimonials on their website. Call or email the clients and ask them questions. If they confirm that the web host is good, then the company has passed this test. However, if you don’t even find a single testimonial on their website, they probably don’t have any satisfied client. What to do? Just leave them alone.

4. How fast or how well does the company respond to support emails? You can find out by conducting this small test. Visit the web host’s website and submit or email an enquiry to them. If you don’t get a response in 24 – 48 hours, please run away as fast as your legs can carry you. Why? When you host your website with them and you have a problem, it will take them more than a month to respond to your support emails or requests.

5. You should not forget to check out their prices. The prices must be within reasonable limits and their packages must have the features you desire; adequate monthly transfer, email addresses, MySQL databases, CGI bin, FTP access, control panel etc. Very high prices don’t necessarily translate into very good services. Don’t be fooled by high prices. It’s a common trick, please don’t fall for it.

6. It must be easy and secure to make payments to your web host. It is not advisable to fill in your credit card details when making your payment. You should rather use a web host that accepts other forms of payment that do not require you to fill in your credit card details e.g. paypal and egold. If you are in a country where you don’t have easy access to credit card facilities, it is even better to use a web host that accepts payment in your local currency. This will ensure that you won’t have any problems when you want to renew your domain and your hosting accounts.

7. Use only web hosts that give 24 hour online access to your account. With that, you have total control over your domain and your website and you can change anything including your name servers (DNS)whenever you want.

8. It is better to use a web host that offers additional web services such as web design, website promotion, search engine submission and website management. They can be of help to you in future if you have any problems with your website or you need any additional services.

9. Before you make your payment, read the terms and conditions of the company carefully. If you don’t understand or agree with any of their terms contact them for more explanations.

10. Finally, I know it may be very time consuming for you to conduct these tests on the hundreds of web hosts out there before choosing one. I have therefore taken the pains to analyse hundreds of them. I recommend two web hosts that have passed our simple tests. I can put my reputation on the line and guarantee their efficiency, reliability and affordability.

Article Source: http://www.a1-optimization.com/articles

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