Choose the Right Host!

So you want to join the millions of other tech savvy people and start your own website or blog. You take a look around and soon find that there are literally thousands of companies out there offering hosting. So which one do you choose? Here are some important pointers you should look out for, next time you choose a host.

Reliability

What good is having a website if its down on a regular basis. Many times, you will only discover a host is unreliable after you have registered. Therefore, do a simple Google search looking for customer complaints – don’t trust the testimonials found on the hosts website. A number of hosts will also offer a 99.9% uptime guarantee. This is useless unless they offer you a free month of hosting if your site goes down. I know HostingZOOM offered me 1 months free hosting when my site went down for just over 30mins and that has only ever happened once. A few other companies will offer similar deals.

Space and Bandwidth

Will you ever need 250gb of space and 2tb of Bandwidth? Well, for the average user the answer is no. However I can see one of blogs exceeding its bandwidth allowance in the next few months. Two companies that offer you ridiculous amounts of space and traffic are Dreamhost and AN Hosting. Dreamhost will actually keep on increasing the amount of space and traffic and AN hosting gives you more then enough to begin with. You will probably never use all of the resources these two hosts offer, but woudln’t it be nice if you could host all your downloads, podcasts, videos etc on your own account instead of using a third party service.

Digg Proof

This wouldn’t have been a requirement a few years ago, however if you have ever been touched by the hand of Digg you will know how frustrating it can be when your site crashes. The Digg effect will sends thousands of visitors to your site in a short space of time. Look for a host that offers something along the lines of clustered failover. This means that if one server goes down your site will still be accessible on another server. MediaTemple became famous for claiming they were Digg proof and I haven’t heard any complaints on that statement.

Features and Add-ons

When I was shopping for a host I made sure I looked for a company that offered a quality control panel, email, script installers and unlimited subdomains and databases. If your host doesn’t offer all this then look elsewhere because all of the hosts I have mentioned so far offer these features at a price you are probably already paying. AN Hosting will also give you a free domain. I find the most useful feature is a script installer that will install blogs, shopping carts, cms, forums etc with just a few clicks. This makes getting a blog or similar site up and running a simple and hassle free process.

Customer Support

Look for a host that offers free technical support available both through email and phone.

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