Choosing a Hosting Company
Which one is Right for You
This article serves as a tutorial on choosing a website hosting company.
The Internet has revolutionized the way we seek and find information. In addition, the Internet has made it extremely easy for anyone to share their opinion, expertise and provide services to others. All an individual needs is an Internet account and a website.
But before others can view your new website, you need to find someone to host or provide you space on the Internet to store your site; you need to choose a hosting company.
Just do a search for “website hosting“ and your search will return at least a few hundred hosting companies. Because there are so many companies offering hosting, it can often lead to confusion. So how does one go about choosing the right web hosting company?
A Web hosting company is nothing but a company that has dedicated computers that are always connected to the Internet. Your website is stored on one of these computers (called servers) and is made available on the Internet for anyone who wishes to access your website, by using what is known as a search engine (i.e. Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.) and a web browser.
Here, are some things to consider to help you choose a web hosting company that fits your needs:
- Reliability of the company, meaning how good are they at keeping your website up and running. This is known as “Up-Time“. No matter how well your website is designed or how great the information is, if your website is not available to people, what good is it. You want to select a a web hosting company, that has a stellar up-time rating, as close to 100% as possible. Every web hosting company needs to bring down its system at some point to perform periodic maintenance, but a company with a high up-time rate will reduce your frustration.
- Technical support provided by the web hosting company. The support provided by the company when you are having a problem with your website is very important. Some offer complete technical support for 24/7 , 365 days a year.
- Bandwidth that is available. Bandwidth is the amount of traffic that is allowed to occur between your web site and the rest of the Internet. Make sure that you select a company that can supply the proper amount of bandwidth. Higher visitor rates to your website may may cause you to run short bandwidths which would result in your website not being available to potential visitors.
- Storage space provided by the web hosting company is another area one needs to consider. This is related to the amount of space that the hosting allows you in order to store your website files on its server. Make sure that the web hosting company provides an ample amount of space. However, I do want to point out that this is rarely an issue, because most hosting companies offer more storage space than you can use in a life-time.
- Finally the cost... The cost to host a website on the Internet will vary. I would encourage you to spend some time comparing rates between companies. Web hosting companies tend to offer several hosting plans, take some time and evaluate which one is best for your website.
From my personal experience, I highly recommend BlueHost.com. BlueHost is a company that offers the combination of all the above factors. From registering a new domain name for you to 24 hour technical support. Their pricing plan are one of the best on the market.
Their servers are upgraded at frequent intervals to keep in pace with the fast Internet growth. I have found that their services have exceeded all of my expectations. Be sure to visit them and check out their services. I have several websites running on BlueHost.com, for more than five years and I have rarely had an problem, that is why I highly recommend them.
Best Web Hosting Companies
The list of web hosting companies reviewed in PlusTen.com have been selected as the best web hosting companies at this point in time. The reviews of each web hosting provider are based on human verification and interviews with web hosting company officials.
Mostly all of the web hosting companies do offer a 24/7 support center and supports PHP with MySQL. The chart below shows who has been rated as the top 10 website hosting companies based on voters. Choose your web hosting company very carefully and spend some time by reading web hosting reviews to get the best web hosting solution for your website.
Note: Don’t forget to pickup a promo or coupon code for your new web hosting account, they’re usually offered by almost every web hosting company.
