Choosing the Right Web Hosting Company
Before you can establish your web presence, you are going to have to choose a web hosting company (unless you have the technical skills to host the site yourself that is). With the plethora of web hosting companies out there today, the choices can be daunting and since the comparisons are rarely apples to apples, choosing the proper hosting company for your needs can be a daunting task.
One of the first questions you will need to figure out is what features and content you want on your site, and how much maintenance those features and content require. Do you have the technical skills to maintain the site yourself, and even if you do, do you want to spend the time maintaining it? Some basic websites require very little maintenance as far as the web host goes, but adding ecommerce, CMS (content management systems), blogs, photo albums, and similar features could require you to do more routine maintenance on your web server than you are comfortable performing.
If you are comfortable with performing the routine maintenance, or you feel your site will not need much, than typically choosing a web hosting company that costs less, offers a good amount of storage (at least 100mb) and a fair amount of bandwidth (at least 5gb), and an easy to understand interface would most likely be the best choice for you.
However, if you feel like your site will need a fair amount of maintenance, and you feel like it may be more than you are capable (or willing) to perform on a regular basis you may want to a find a web hosting company that also has the option of maintenance contracts to help you maintain your site. These contracts can range from simple server updates, to website updates, to most any web service you will need. Typically, if you are working with a web design company, they will have a web hosting company they recommend or work with on a routine basis. Your same web design company may also be open to performing the same routine maintenance actions that a web hosting company could perform for you. These are questions you may want to ask before actually choosing a web design company (but that is another post…).
Additionally, if you are the type of person that likes to toy with your website yourself, and you want to have access to common scripts and have an easy way to install them, you may want to look for a web hosting company that offers cPanel hosting with Fantastico. Fantastico is a great tool that integrates easy installation and upgrade routines to many of todays most popular php scripts such as WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, PHPlist and more. Another thing you may wish to look for is a web hosting company that allows you direct FTP access to your space on their servers. Direct FTP access will allow you to install scripts and files yourself, without this, you may not have the total control you so desire.
Some of the last questions would be do you need a dedicated server or a shared server, and is a dedicated IP address necessary for your site? But these are questions that will be addressed in a future post.
Tags: CMS, ecommerce, host, hosting, web, web host, web hosting, websites