When You Depend Your Company's Website, You Have To Make Sure That You Choose A Top-notch Web Hostin

By Author: Wildfire Marketing Group Content Distribution Team
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When you rely your website to generate sales for your business, you need to make sure that you've selected a solid website hosting company. If you're searching for a new website hosting company, here are some things to consider:

Make sure that your host's servers are fast enough. A website that loads slowly will not only frustrate your customers, but may affect your search engine rankings as well, because if it takes the bots too long to crawl your website, they will simply move on to the next one. If they aren't aware of the pages in your website, they can't rank them. For most people, shared hosting will be sufficient, but be certain to check how long it takes your pages to load occasionally just to ensure that it's not taking too long. If you begin to realize a trend of slow load times, you may want to think about finding a new web host, or upgrading to a dedicated server.

Bandwidth and storage is another detail that you don't want to ignore Many hosts offer unlimited bandwidth and storage these days, but if you're website is hosted with a host that doesn't, you may be surprised with unanticipated fees if you ...
... exceed your limits. This may not seem like a significant risk, but a modest advertising campaign may quickly do exactly that.

Most hosts offer guaranteed up-time, which is critical, but make sure they follow through on it. Some of the smaller hosting companies will make the guarantee, but then leave you hanging in the wind. Some hosting companies have had major downtime, sometimes lasting for days or even weeks. Their customers suffered lost profits while the host tried to solve their problems. You don't want to find your self in this position, so do your homework.

Features will vary drastically from host to host, so you'll have to invest some time to determine if they can meet your needs. Most hosting companies offer options like on-click installs for web-based applications, back-up utilities, auto-responders, etc. You also need to make sure that they offer the operating system that you need; some applications will only run on a Microsoft Windows or a Cold Fusion server.

Support is another factor to consider. Most hosting companies offer support via phone at no charge, while, some offer it only for additional fees. All hosting companies offer support via email, but you'll need to think about any time differences. If your website hosting company is located in a different time zone, it could be quite some time before you receive an answer to any support requests.

Finally, make sure that you carefully read their terms of service agreement. Some hosting companies have some outrageous terms buried in there in hopes that people won't bother to read them. As the old adage goes, buyer beware.

Selecting the best host is no easy job, but it is worthwhile to do it right the first time around. You'll save yourself a lot of headaches and lost profits down the road.
For more information on choosing the best host, visit Web Hosting Reviews, and if your website design needs a facelift, be sure to check out Wildfire Marketing Group