Posted: 2008-01-12 14:40
Are you looking to get a website, but don't know what steps to take to get it done.
Web hosting can be one of the most important decisions you can make. You need to choose your web hosting provider carefully as it may be harder to move once you have everything built and in place.
So, what should you look for in a web hosting provider?
1. Well, for starters you should look for reliability. Find out what the web hosting companies "up-time" is. That is the amount of time that the website will be available online. An uptime of 99.9% is obviously good, but believe it or not, 97% or 98% is not that great. 98% uptime means your website was offline for over 3 hours that week. That's three hours that a customer can't get to what you want to sell them. Think about this; have you ever tried to go to a website and had it not come up? Did you go back to that site later, or did you find what you were looking for somewhere else.
2. The next thing I look for is ease of use. How difficult is it going to be to host a website with that provider? How are you going to manage your website? Do they have a good control panel? This also would depend on your level of experience with working with your web site so you might want to assess your skill level and then ask the host or research if they will be a good fit for you.
3. What kind of support does this reliable web hosting provider offer? Do they have 24/7 support? Is that support over the phone, or chat? Or do you have to e-mail them or put in a "support ticket" and they'll get back to you? I don't know about you, but I prefer phone support or online chat. Email can take forever and in some instances just tells me that the host isn't willing to make time for me to assist me with any issues that I may have.
4. And then there is price. We all know the "host your site for $1.00 per month and get 500 billion gigabytes of disk space and 1 Trillion gigabytes of bandwidth or transfer. Who really uses all that "promised" amount of resources any way? Most sites do not. Make your decision on the quality of the hosting provider and not the amount of disk space they give you. A friend once told me that cheap servers aren't always cheap and you may very well experience this if you make your decision based on price.
The main point is to determine what your needs are and then match them with a suitable web hosting provider. Don't be afraid to call your potential host and feel them out. Look around and read up on focus group sites to find the best host for you.
Argon Hosting offers solid web hosting plans at affordable prices.




