How To Select A Website Hosting Company

By Author: unknownmem
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How To Choose the Best Web Host

As with most investments, our initial reaction when choosing a web host is to go with the cheapest. Hey, they're all the same, why spend more? Au contraire.

There are many of objective criteria that differentiate one web host from another and price is just one of them. And not the most significant one. Selecting a company based on price alone is no different than choosing an auto mechanic based on price alone. Sure, he may maintain or repair your car for less. But will the car spend all the time in the shop and none on the road?

The first consideration is 'horsepower'. Do they have the capacity to carry your traffic and deliver decent performance? Many hosting companies will advertise that they have tremendous bandwidth and thousands of servers. They're usually telling the truth.

But there's a difference between current capacity and usable capacity. If they also have thousands of other websites with millions of visitors per day the available or free capacity will be substantially lower. A large pickup truck may be able to tow 5,000 lbs., but not if it's already carrying ...
... 4,999.

Be sure to ask about available capacity, and have the prospective company back it up with reliable numbers. If you can't interpret the information they provide, find someone to help explain it.

Next, and a very close second, is reliability. A lot of power is useless if it's cut often. Outages are an expected part of business. Even Google and Microsoft go down now and then. The difference is, it happens rarely and they have fail-over plans. That means, if their site/system does go down it's either back up again in a flash, or you never see the outage because a backup system takes over automatically and seamlessly.

Be sure to question the company closely regarding their up time. They'll often tout 99.6%, or some such figure. But, like the on-time figures of the airlines, those statistics can be shaded by adjusting the definition of 'up time'. What matters to you is whether your visitors will be able to access your site at any time of the day or night they may want to.

Find out what systems, both technical and human, they have set up to deal with failures of all sorts. Servers can go down, networks can fail, hard disks can become defective and lose data even when the other components continue to perform fine. The result is YOUR site is unavailable, which is all that matters to you. The web hosting company should be able to deal with all of that and have your website up again very quickly.

Last, but not least, is security. With the continuing prevalence of viruses and spam, you need to be sure that the web hosting company you choose has an array of methods for dealing with them. That means a good technical plan and employees who are knowledgeable in dealing with those issues. The old quote: 'an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure' is more true here than anywhere else.

All these criteria are important in choosing a web hosting company that can deliver the services you require. After those criteria are met by a number of candidates, then you can start narrowing them down by price.
If you're not achieving the results you need online, talk to one of the top web site design firms, Wildfire Marketing Group! And if you're looking for a dependable web host, check out the Hostgator reviews, at Ace Web Hosting Reviews.