Web Hosting
GUIDE

Determining Your Web Hosting Needs

Description: Everyone has different needs when it comes to getting their website online. That's why it pays to work out what you need before you start looking for a web hosting plan.

Every website has a different reason for being online, and every webmaster has a different reason for creating that website. That's why choosing a web hosting plan can be difficult, because it has to match up to what you will require.

The most important thing for anyone to know is that their web host will be reliable. You want the maximum amount of uptime possible. No one expects to have a service that's available 100% of the time - anyone who claims such a thing should be viewed with caution as it is practically impossible - but you want to know that they achieve 99.9% uptime. Furthermore you will want to know what their track record is like in getting the service back if they do ever experience problems.

Next you need to think about what kind of website you have. There are lots of different hosting plans available and while many of them offer fantastic services, plenty of bandwidth and even shopping carts, not every website requires this kind of thing.

If you have a simple personal site that has no more than a few pages to it, then you won't need too many services as it's unlikely that you will be getting thousands of visitors a day. You may not even want to optimize your site to be found by the search engines if your only audience is going to be the people you tell personally.

At the other end of the scale are the sites that are expecting to receive a lot of visitors and that sell goods over the internet. If you have this type of website you will need to make sure your visitors can pay securely. In this case you will need to look around to see what ecommerce hosting packages are available.

One of the key points with any kind of web hosting is the price. This kind of market is very competitive nowadays, so if you see a web host offering a package that would suit you that really seems too good to be true, that may not necessarily be the case. You need to examine exactly which services are offered within that package and see how many of them you really need before making a final decision.

One final point - remember that even once you decide on your web hosting needs and you start hosting your site with a particular provider, you can always move your site to a new one at any point. The only drawback is that moving your site isn't always as easy as it sounds - so it makes sense that your choice is a good one right from the start.