What You Need to Know in Choosing a Web Hosting Plan

bandwithThere are various web hosts available and many of them offer the same basic features. When it comes down to it, you need to figure out what features you need for your website, always keeping in mind the long term potential. Also note that it is easier to upgrade than to downsize, so go with the most appropriate plan.

To start off, let’s talk briefly about the few types of web hosting plans that you can choose.

How about free web hosting?

Yes, I said free so put your wallet away. However, being that this is free, there are restrictions and rules. This is not a web hosting plan that is recommended for online businesses. Free hosts are a better fit for small personal web sites that will never gain a large following of visitors. Any web site that has a steady flow of traffic should always opt for a shared hosting account that allows for some knowledge of how much you can use.

And the next choice on the list, shared hosting

This is the most commonly used, affordable web hosting choice for the up and coming webmasters. More options are offered with this plan as opposed to dedicated web hosting. The price is much cheaper and the specifications are normally enough for most web sites.

Last stop, dedicated hosting with the big boys

This is more flexible and allows you to have full control because of the fact that you are not sharing servers. Your website will be able to handle a large amount of visitors without missing a beat. Dedicated hosting is only necessary after gaining a large following for your web sites, or if you have a very CPU intensive script to run. The costs are high with this form of hosting, which make if the final necessity.

Now that we have gone through the several different types of web hosting plans, you need to get a bit more in depth with your needs. There are five major components that make up the web hosting that also aides in your decision making. Memory space is important, since you will need to figure out the size of your websites and then you can use that to determine the approximation of the disk space that you will need.

Bandwidth is the next component on the list. Depending on the amount of visitors and the complexity of your website, you may not require much bandwidth. Remember to think about how fast your sites might grow, and what that will mean for your hosting. If your load time begins to deteriorate, so will your following, so make sure to keep up to date with the numbers.

Support is a big issue when it comes to deciding on a web host. When you are in need it is extremely helpful to have the professionals waiting around for your call. It can be very stressful to have to worry about the problem that you have and have to wait till office hours to deal with it. Some web hosts have 24/7 support, while others you have to wait until they can get back to you. With all these things kept in mind, it should be no problem choosing a hosting plan.

More info on picking the right web hosts and making the right key decisions can be found on our main site.

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