Saturday, June 25, 2011

Choosing A Web Host For Your Business Website

by: William King

Online presence of a business in the form of a website is something becoming common. Businesses nowadays want to spend time to make their online presences accessible and reliable. These business sites help present businesses with a lot of useful ways for communicating with the customers. There are many things to consider while launching a website for a business. One of the most important things to consider is the web hosting services provided to host that company’s website online. Many business owners don’t give any importance about how the web hosts play a vital role in their online presence. Think of yourself in place of a customer. How do you feel when you are not able to access your account for any service online you subscribed to, doesn’t that boil your blood? Will you like some hacker just getting into your credit card details you just dropped online to get all the money you have? Now think about your customers facing similar to these or other complex problems.

Web hosting services are of many types and have different price ranges. First you should consult with your web designer as well as your web developer on the type of site they have made for you. They will tell you the capabilities your website has and what will be the hosting requirements for that. If you are expecting a lot of website traffic then you will have to be considering some really traffic tacking heavy web host provider. On the other hand if your traffic is low, you don’t need to get yourself entangle into high paying options.

Some of the criteria if you made your site your self include server uptime, maintenance standards, operating system, your traffic support, email accounts supported, users supported simultaneously and also the total space available. Uptime is something which tells us how much we should expect a hosting server to be down for maintenance in terms of percentage of times it has been accessed. Good companies have usually more then 95% server uptime. They usually have backup servers available in case of any problem. Do ask for the backup facilities available. Certain websites don’t run on systems with different operating systems. Clearly ask the web host provider the operating system it supports. Also ask for other details like emails and users support. If your website is worked on by many people then you need hosting that supports these advance features. Web hosting service again needs to be planned by your web designer or developer and then you need to check the service from a web host service provider.