When a business owner chooses
to move some or all of their marketing to the Internet,
choosing a hosting service can be a major production.
This article gives new domain owners a look at what
is truely important.
Are you ready for a web site? Not
sure what to look for? Use this article to help you
determine the best hosting company for your site.
Growth
Is this a company you can grow with vs. having to change
companies when you outgrow the service?
Customer Service
Many people start with a lost cost service, only to
find that the only way to receive customer service is
by email. Choose a company that offers you low cost
services with a
long distance phone number for customer service. If
you need a larger service, $20 a month +, they should
offer you a toll free customer service number.
Reliability
Do they provide information about their server uptime/downtime
(and possibly even provide a guarantee)? Do they provide
you with your own IP Address? (that's a special
number identification system for a web site, vs. the
worded identification most people are familiar with.)
Choices
The type of server you will need depends on the programs
you want to run for things like your shopping cart,
affiliate program, web site pages, etc. ASP, JSP, PHP,
CGI, PL, CSS
programs will influence the choice of a server and visa
versa. Your hosting service may have windows (which
for example accepts ASP but not PHP), Linux or nix-based
(Apache/FreeBSD/etc.) servers.
Email Accounts
How many Pop 3 accounts (Post Office Protocol) do you
want? Basically, these are email accounts where both
the to and from accounts are your domain names. The
other type, you don't want as a business owner are "alias"
accounts where the to account is your domain name, then
it's transferred to your ISP/DSL account. Outgoing mail
does not include your domain name account.
Security
If you want a shopping cart, make sure that your site
is secure, is encrypted and has the programming capacity
that allows you to produce a shopping cart, too.
Statistics
Does your hosting companies plan include monthly and
yearly statistics on each of your web pages? Will you
know how someone found each of your web pages?
Easy
Does your hosting package include a simple to understand
control panel? This is especially important if you want
to maintain your site or have someone else easily maintain
it. It's one place to visit when making changes to your
site, add addresses, etc.
Protection
It is easy to password protect a page or area of your
web site? This is becoming more important as web owners
develop client, subscriber and note areas of their web
sites.
Web Email Option
Can you easily read your messages on line, when you
travel, because it has a Web-based Email system?
Pluses:
Does it offer an ezine subscription
service and if so, will it accept both text and HTML?
Does your hosting package include
an easy to use web page builder?
Does it include a way for you to
send your files to the server?
If you are building or having your
site built with MS Front Page, you want to make sure
that the server accepts Front Page pages.
