What to watch out for when looking for hosting
Whether you’re looking for a new hosting account or thinking of changing your provider, there are a number of pitfalls one should avoid.
- Do you know what specs you require? If you’re not a techie, perhaps you should leave this up to your designer or developer, as they may require certain features on the web server that the host you’re looking at doesn’t provide.
- If you are building the website yourself and know what you need, make sure you choose either Linux/Unix or Windows from the start, because getting your provider to change your package after the fact might not be as simple as it sounds.
- Do you need to register a domain name? Again, ask your designer or developer to help you with this as it can be less hassle to setup the domain and hosting at the same time.
- How much space do you really need? A lot of providers offer huge packages with unlimited disk space. This may seem attractive to the untrained, but most small business websites take up less space than you could fit on a floppy disk (1.44 mb in case you’ve forgotten). So a 50Mb package (if you’re not going to be swapping video clips with your friends) is often more than sufficient. In addition, most hosting accounts allow you to forward email to another email address, so you could set up an email forwarder for info@yourdomain.com to your free GMAIL account, which offers a top quality service with around 8Gb of space (more than most will ever fill in a lifetime). Then you can set up an alias on your GMAIL account so that you can send emails so they appear to be coming from info@yourdomain.com, and that way you’ll maintain the professionalism you need.
- You get what you pay for. If someone is offering you web hosting for 50 cents per month, the support is probably going to be bad or non-existent. If/when your site goes down you want to know that they’ll get it back up as soon as possible, especially if your business relies on online sales. A good way to gauge support is to ask a pre-sales query. If you get a response within a few hours or same day, you’re probably going to get ok support. But if they take 2-3 days to get back to you, forget about receiving a quick reply when your site is offline.
- Telephone support isn’t generally offered with web hosting companies due to the relative expense compared to the number of calls they could receive, so don’t be put off if your prospective host doesn’t offer someone to chat to 24/7. The chances are they will still provide a good quality email response.
These are just a few tips to help you decide whether you’re getting what you want.
