Selecting a hosting plan is a critical step when you want to start up a website.  Prior posts from me were about domain name choice and website creation.  Now let’s talk a little about hosting:  One of the critical decisions you will have to make is what type of hosting plan to use and what hosting provider to choose.

The next step after creating your website is to make it live on the internet, or publish it.  To have your website seen on the internet you will need to choose a hosting plan.  By purchasing a domain name you have branded, or named your website.  You own the name, but now you must pay rent to someone to actually get your website online.  To make your website live on the internet you will be paying a service provider to publish it for you.  That’s what a hosting plan is.  Let’s go over some of the key important factors to consider when choosing a hosting plan:

SERVICE  First and foremost in your decision is to consider the hosting provider’s reputation for it’s services.  It does not matter that a multitude of features are offered or if the price is low if the service you will be getting with your hosting plan is sub par or even worse, nonexistent.  After you have published, or “gone live” on the internet, the last thing you want is for the website to go down and become unavailable to potential customers.  For that reason you want to be sure and choose a hosting provider that will provide the best uptime as well the best availability and quality of customer service.

UPTIME  When shopping for a hosting company, find out if they have an uptime guarantee. Many guarantee 99% uptime for their servers.  Even at 99% average uptime it can mean that your website will be off the internet for over 7 hours per month. If at all possible, choose a host guaranteeing up to 99.9% uptime.

SIZE  How large is your site?  Most hosting providers set the pricing on their hosting plans according to the space taken up on their servers by the website.  If your website will be media rich with videos or music or photo files, or a large e-commerce site with a lot of catalogue pages, you will have to take space into consideration as a criteria for choosing the right hosting plan.

LINUX OR WINDOWS  Which operating system should your hosting plan use?  This question has no relevance to the brand of operating system you are using on your computer.  The determining factor here is what programming language was used to design the website.  For example, if CGI or PHP programming language was used, the best choice for the hosting operating system would be Linux.  For a website designed with ASP, the best choice would be Windows.  Note that if you are simply publishing a basic html website, the choice of hosting Operating system won’t really matter as much until you get into more advanced languages such as PHP or ASP.

TRAFFIC  Will you be expecting lots of visitors to your website?  hosting plans are usually sold at different level plans according to the bandwith that will be required.  Bandwidth = Traffic.  Obviously more bandwidth is better because it allows more visitors to visit your site, but at the beginning this will be hard for you to gauge.  The best advice here is to start off with a low cost, low bandwidth plan and upgrade it later as the traffic to your website grows.

SHARED OR DEDICATED hosting  The question of shared vs. dedicated hosting is really answered in a very simple way:  A shared hosting plan is exactly as it sounds, and means that your website will be stored on a server along with lots of other websites.  In this hosting format you generally have no ability to make changes to the resident software on the system, meaning you cannot change or upgrade the operating system, or the database management system, etc.  You will have to work within the software structure provided by the hosting company.  Using dedicated (or virtual dedicated) hosting means that you have full control over the server your website is stored on and that only your data occupies the space on that server.  In other words, you would determine what operating system to use, what type database management software, what type of blog software, what type shopping cart, etc., etc.  This type of hosting is definitely geared to the more advanced user, and usually you won’t be able to get as much customer support because it will be a custom setup.  The bottom line:  start off with shared hosting if you are a beginner, until you are advanced enough to progress to your own controlled dedicated hosting environment.

At StartYourWebsiteToday.com our uptime guarantee is 99.9% and we offer 24/7 customer service.  The hosting plans that are offered include a variety: shared hosting, virtual dedicated hosting, and dedicated hosting plans with either Linux or Windows operating systems for every need and budget ranging from the small personal website to large online multimedia sites to those interested in ecommerce website building. To review the options we offer, click HERE: Hosting plans.