The number of websites on the Internet have grown exponentially over the past fifteen years. All these websites must be hosted on a web server somewhere. The website hosting market is therefore huge and forever expanding. There are such a large number of web hosts that it’s sometimes confusing for a newcomer. Let us give you some guidelines in this regard.
As a jumping off point, you should never pay for something that you do not need. If yours is a private site with a number of holiday pictures, you will most probably be satisfied with what you can get from a free hosting account. Perhaps your ISP offers you a couple of megabytes free space. If not, you don’t have to go far on the Internet before running into a free hosting company.
The drawback of free hosting is that you will normally not be able to use your own domain name. You will have to use a subdomain of the hosting company. For a private person this is usually not a huge issue. Another drawback is that the hosting company will often display banner ads at the top of your pages.
If free hosting is for some or other reason not for you, your only other option is a paid account. You will of course be able to host a domain name that goes well with your website’s content, such as myownwidgetcompany.com for example. You usually also get a decent amount of data transfer and disk space – more than what most free accounts provide. On top of that there will be no restriction on the use of programming scripts and languages such as javascript, Java, PHP and Perl/cgi.
There is something you should be aware of as far as bandwidth and disk space are concerned. Many hosting companies follow a practice that is called ‘overselling’. They advertise unlimited space and bandwidth, but if your website really uses a lot of these, they will refer you to the small print where it says that there is in fact a limit to what you can use.
Rather buy a specific amount of space and bandwidth that is sufficient for your purposes. Unless you are going to host videos or millions of pictures on your website, even 1Gb of space should be enough. To give you an idea, this is enough space to host about 10 000 average web pages with the odd picture included.
If you plan to sell anything on your website, you will most likely need facilities for a shopping card. Most hosting companies provide that. If you just link to an outside payment processor where the customer will provide his credit card details, you don’t have a problem. If you want to accept credit cards on your own website, you will also need a secure server, a dedicated IP number and a security certificate.
Not all website hosting companies offer the same quality of service. For a business website, uptime is very important. Attempt to find a company, therefore, that offers a guarantee for uptime in excess of 99.7%. They should also have knowledgeable support staff on duty around the clock, 7 days a week.
Get the exclusive inside scoop on how to find the right web hosting plan to suit your requirements and budget now in our complete Gossimer overview.
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