It doesn’t matter if you want to host a brand new website or move an existing on to a new host. What does matter is that the host you use offers an exceptional level of service for the money. Businesses and organizations rely on their website to deliver new sales prospects. Individuals want other people to read the messages they convey from their blogs.
If your website is slow to access or is inaccessible for most of the time, it can have a devastating effect. First, even the most determined of people will give up trying to access your site. And, second, it can have an adverse effect for SEO (search engine optimization) purposes.
If you want to make sure you choose the best host for your website, you need to follow the tips in this handy guide! Check them out:
How busy will your site be?
The first question you need to answer is how much traffic you think your website will generate. If you’re hosting a brand new site, it can be a bit tricky to gauge what volume of traffic it’s likely to have. But, if you’re moving an existing site, you can check your site’s statistics to determine traffic levels.
When web hosts offer their services, one of the “specs” they tell customers about is bandwidth. In case you didn’t know, bandwidth is a measure of data transferred to and from the server.
For example, let’s say your host offers 1GB of bandwidth each month. When they say that, they are talking about the amount of data can get sent and received to and from the server. If you exceed that quota, your website may stop working until you upgrade your bandwidth or wait for the next month.
Before you sign up for a hosting plan, you need to make sure you allow for adequate bandwidth provision for your website.
How much space do you need?
You also need to find out how much disk space on the server you need. For most sites, half a gigabyte is enough. Some hosts like CheapWindowsVPS offer plenty of space as standard, and that’s useful for larger database-driven websites.
Another option is to store some of your files on a cloud-based service provider like Amazon S3. For example, let’s say that you run a blog. As you know, blogs often have plenty of images displayed on each post.
You could host the main part of the blog on a web server. And you could also use a CDN (Content Delivery Network – i.e. the cloud) to serve multimedia like images and videos.
How much should you spend?
There is no standard price for hosting; it’s up to the provider to offer their services according to what they think is a fair price. There are many hosts online that you can use, so it’s worth spending some time finding one that offers the best value for money.
Go too cheap, and you could end up using an unreliable provider. Pay too much, and you could be spending more money than you need to.
When seeking out a new host for your website, try to benchmark their services. For instance, what is their “uptime”? Decent hosts will usually guarantee a 99.9% uptime.
By following these tips, you can be certain you’ll find a decent host for your website. Good luck!