So you have a fantastic new website with amazing content, but you don’t have a way for the public to see it. This is the time for a good web host. There are countless companies offering web hosting online, with varying prices and differing levels of legitimacy. But what should you be looking for exactly?
First of all, find a good web host. There is no point of having a website if the hosting company has constant issues with keeping the website live. The other important factor is price. You want to keep costs down, after all who doesn’t?
Network
Ideally, you want to find a company that has its own data center and network, rather than that being outsourced to other companies. This ensures that if a problem is to occur, the staff members of the company should be onsite to fix the problem as soon as possible. Finding these companies can be difficult, however they do exist. Check review sites to see what other people think of these sites to see how legitimate they are.
If you can get a free web host that provides a good quality of service, then you’re laughing. The free plans will not offer as many services as some other ones; however you can always simply use them as a trial basis. If you feel an upgrade is necessary, then you know whether that company is worth dealing with or not.
Disk Space
Some websites can be small, other can be large, especially those who host data heavy content on their site, such as high definition video or uncompressed audio. If you are starting with a new website to provide information about your small offline company, you won’t need much space at all. Maybe some room for a few images, and possibly a short video about what you do, and then just the text. This also means you can keep bandwidth down as there is less content to be accessed.
If you have a larger website, the content might increase in size a bit, this being due to more images, more video, and a general increase in high quality content. However, if your website is large and takes up a fair bit of data, you need as much space as you can get. A video tutorial website that doesn’t link to other video hosting sites would require something like this.
Data Transfer Allowance
You need to consider how many people will view your site in a month, and then try and work out how much data these people would download. You do not want to go over your bandwidth allowance, as certain hosts might temporarily shut down your site, or charge excess fees. Large sites with lots of high quality content will need much higher bandwidth allowances. It might even be worth selecting a hosting plan with an unlimited data transfer allowance if this is going to apply to you.
In Short
At Servers Australia, we offer three web hosting packages. Free, Business and Advanced hosting. The names are rather self explanatory to what each offers. Free hosting for those on a low budget, Business hosting for basic business website needs, and Advanced Critical Hosting for those whose websites receive large amounts of traffic accessing gigabytes of information. As I said earlier, you can always pick a free service to start with and use it as a trial for that company. If an upgrade is within your budget, and you think it’s a smart move, go ahead and do it.
Check out our Business Web Hosting section for information on plans offered by Servers Australia.
