Also known as a Web host service, a hosting company allows businesses and individuals the ability to create their own accessible and individual websites through the World Wide Web.
Best web hosting company gives you space on your server for a fee depending on the package you decide on. You can purchase just a web page and upload files yourself or you can hire someone to do it for you.
Personal websites are usually sponsored by advertisements and are usually free whereas business sites are usually more expensive. If you are a business having a web site hosted by a highly recommended company will get your product or service exposed to a larger market.
How Do I Find The Best Web Hosting Company?
As a customer, you need to do an evaluation of the different application requirements you need and select which hosting type to use. You need to check what kind of scripting software, operating system and database server software you have. Many times, hosts provide web hosting which is Linux-based and this offers a variety of software options.
Typically, the Linux server configuration consists of a platform called LAMP which stands for PHP, MySQL, Apache and Linux. You as a customer can also select Windows as the hosting platform. Many customers also select a web content management system which means you won’t have to worry about any of the technical aspects.
Ok, But How Do I Find MY Best Web Hosting Company?
The first thing you need to do is do a bit of research to find out what all the different web hosting companies offer (check out our top ten web hosting picks). If you have any favorite web pages find out what company hosts them by looking at the lower right hand side of the page (in the browser), where the name of the web host usually is.
Get in touch with the company and see if they are offering any packages you would be interested in (you will most likely be looking for a shared hosting packages if you are new the online world, they are the cheapest and truly offer a good bang for the buck).
Check to see what their price range is as well. Most importantly, see if they also offer twenty-four hour technical customer support which will be very convenient if you have any questions.
It is somewhat recommended that you try out some of the free web hosting services available just to get the feel of things before you embark on hiring a web hosting company (although this isn’t completely necessary). On the other hand if you are sure about what a company offers, you can go ahead and talk to a customer service sales representative about their different products and packages.
Features Offered by the Best Web Hosting Companies
The following features and resources are the minimum you should expect to be offered by a top of the line web hosting company.
- Guaranteed Server Uptime – While many hosting companies offer 99% uptime server guarantee, the top of the line hosts will offer 99.9% server uptime guarantee. Essentially this means that you can expect no server downtime and therefore no website downtime also.
- Your customers and clients will never have a problem accessing your site, the site will not be slow to load, and as a result any revenue generated by the site will not be compromised.
- Customer Service – A good web host will take the extra time and effort to train a customer support team that will be available 24/7/365. This is fast becoming the standard in the hosting industry, and the support team must be reachable by telephone, by email and also by chat session.
- Customer service is critical to a webmaster especially as the website operates 24 hours a day online, so it would be good if a webmaster could get the support he needs 24 hours a day also.
- Control Panel – Control panels are used to handle the many web hosting tasks that must be done to properly manage the operations of the website. The state of the art cPanel is used by the best web hosting companies.
- This control panel is a graphical user interface, which makes it extremely easy for even a novice to complete the complex hosting tasks with just a few clicks of the mouse.
- Scripts – Most web masters will need the use of scripts to create blogs or websites, and the best hosting companies will provide these free of charge. Either SimpleScripts or Fantastico is provided to create blogs, and website builders are available for the fast creation of websites.
- Unlimited Resources – Many of the best web hosts make unlimited disc space, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited email addresses, unlimited domain hosting, unlimited databases, available to their hosting clients.
The best advice is to choose a proven industry leader, because there are a lot of local web hosts who come and go, have lots of problems, and also have crappy support — it’s best to avoid these companies from the start.
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