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You need to consider the following before choosing your hosting company;
- Uptime
- Space & Bandwidth
- Where is the Hosting company located?
- User Reviews
- Time in business
- Customer Support
Uptime
The total percentage of time that the hosting company’s servers have been up and running. This has an obvious impact on the visibility and performance of your website so you want to choose a company with an impressive uptime record.
Space & Bandwidth
How much space and bandwidth does the hosting company give you? Running out of bandwidth implies that your website might not be online which may have the adverse effect of negative PR for your website.
Where is the Hosting company located?
As a general rule you should follow your clients and traffic. Is most of your target audience is say based in Spain then it makes sense to get Spanish hosting because it will be a lot faster than if you get the low cost based elsewhere.
User Reviews
One of the greatest things about the internet is that information on products and services is freely available. Before you commit to a hosting company it is definitely worthwhile to check you a few hosting review sites and read about first hand experiences from users. Your may find the following sites useful,
Time in business
Because hosting is such an essential part of mechanics of your site, you should spend time to find out when the company was established. Unfortunately some companies in the hosting community have cast a shadow on genuine institutions.
Customer Support
A good hosting company should response to your enquiry in a reasonable time frame. Most companies will response to your enquiry with 24 hours which is a good benchmark. Of course you need to bear in mind time zone differences and whether the company offers 24/7 support.
For more information on the most highly rated web hosting companies go to our article on the Top 10 web hosting companies.
After designing your web site you will need a hosting company. Basically a hosting service provider will sell server space to you so you can store you website on the internet.
There are as many hosting companies as there are websites, so the task of choosing the best one can be daunting, to help with that we
have put together the following checklist that you can use as a bench mark for your potential hosting company.
Remember that your host provider will be the home for your website. So make your choice with care and due diligence.