Hosting Your Website
After designing your website, your next course of action is to find a good web hosting company. Selecting an appropriate website host can be very demanding. Look for a hosting site which provides features you are looking for. There are many sites which can lure you with free hosting. It is not a bad idea if you are putting up a small personal website on experimental basis. However, if you are serious about doing business online, then professional website hosting would be the best. It allows sharing space along with numerous other sites on the server. This type of hosting is known as shared hosting and is mostly recommended. In case you visualize your business to grow, where the traffic is expected to be high, uses specialized and exclusive softwares with high level of security, then dedicated hosting is the answer.
A number of companies will attract you with cheap website hosting facilities with as little as 50 MB disk space, unlimited bandwidth and 99.999% reliability for just a few dollars per month. Beware to get in to a trap with cheap services. Most of the time you will observe that during peak hour traffic your website will just not be accessible and down time may be two to three days. If your website has such a large down time, search engines like Google and Yahoo may just wipe you out from their listing.
You should look for a site, which has a large storage space in terms of several hundred MBs (even if your requirement is small) and a large bandwidth in terms of several GBs. Such features will ensure that the site you have chosen will not be overloaded, will host only few sites, enabling it to provide better services. Customer support is very essential. Look for companies that offer money back guarantee, since such companies will ensure reliability and high quality of hosting after all they would not like to lose money and face in the market. Some of the hosting services monitor your site constantly and provide back up to the customer’s file. One such site is Hyperspin which monitors your server and the site every hour and warns you with email alerts for any problems.
Different sites offer you different services, for example, Lunarpages offers more bandwidth, free domain and an add on domain. Hostgator offers unlimited add on domains. Servage can host up to 25 domains, but do not offer money back guarantee and requires quarterly payment. There are many other web hosting sites offering similar packages. Choose the one most suitable for your requirement.