You are probably asking yourself why you need web site hosting. Well, imagine that you have created a personal website, and you want everyone to see it; imagine that you want to develop an e-commerce web site and you want to have as many visitors as possible. This is the moment when you most need web site hosting.
It is true that you can place the site on your computer, but what would you do in case the internet connection fails. If you want your web site to be viewable 24 hours a day seven days a week, then a web site hosting provider is the answer for you.
Several types of web hosting
To make this web site hosting review complete, I should mention the several types of web hosting.
Free shared hosting
First, there is the free shared hosting. This is mostly beneficial for small personal web sites. If you are a beginner in this area, a shared hosting with no fee is perfect for your non-commercial web site. Unfortunately, you can not expect to have the same technical support, disk space, PHP support or bandwidth that other people pay for.
Paid shared hosting
Paid shared hosting is one of the most popular types of web hosting. Small, medium or large professional sites, they all use shared hosting. A whole server will cost too much, and a site will have no need for the whole space, so shared hosting is ideal for them. Besides the low costs, the sites will also have proper technical support, and some other features such as e-mail, PHP or MySQL. The disadvantage is of course the insecurity of shared servers.
Dedicated servers
For a large e-commerce professional web site, the dedicated server is the most reliable solution. This will provide you with all the necessary software; you will have a lot of space and bandwidth and all the other facilities that your web site needs. The only disadvantage appears if you are inexperienced in server administration. Just read a web site hosting review or a forum before you make the final decision.
Co-location
A good web site hosting review would not overlook the co-location. This sub type of dedicated server is not so popular, and it is designed for everyone's personal needs. Also, because you will be the only one using it, the costs will also be supported by yourself.
Virtual private servers
The last of all the web site hosting types is the virtual private server. This is a type of web site hosting that is mainly based on dividing a physical server into several small virtual ones. It will give the same possibilities as a dedicated server but the advantage is that it will cost less.
Now, that we have examined all the different types of hosting services, you can decide which type of hosting is the most suitable for you. I just hope that this web site hosting review will help you make the best decision.
If you do a search in Google for 'Web Hosting' or 'Hosting', the first couple of results that come up are surprisingly enough, not those of actual web hosting companies, but rather web hosting review sites.
These sites are an excellent resource to assist you with making a decision regarding which web host to choose for your foray into the world of the Internet.
A web hosting guide can help you compare the services being offered by different hosting companies. This is a big advantage because you don't have to visit different sites to obtain details. You can log on to a single site and compare services by bandwidth, by price or by disk space.
The other important advantage that these sites offer is that most of them offer a rating service and the opportunity for clients to post comments or reviews. These comments reveal a lot about a hosting company!
Do not be too alarmed though if you find some reviews that are very negative - it is just not possible for a hosting company to be perfect. They WILL make mistakes. The important thing is to try and ascertain how well they recovered or how well they handled their customer service when the problem occurred.
To get the most out of these sites, you need to know what to search for. Some of the newer sites have more refined ways of offering search criteria - you should be able to search on operating system (e.g. Linux or Windows), disk space, bandwidth, price, control panel, features etc.
You therefore need to know how much bandwidth you require, how much hard disk space you require and maybe even have made a decision up front whether you are looking for Linux or Windows hosting.
Once you have decided about what you need, you can start searching for a hosting service. You can use one of the popular search engines, like Google or Yahoo to find a suitable web hosting review site.
Log on to the site and compare the different packages. See which packages or bundled services meet your needs best. Check and compare the specifications of the hardware being offered by the hosting services. Eliminate the hosting services that don't meet your requirements and send the remaining hosts a list of questions. The questions you ask are not so important, but you will get an idea about how prompt the hosts are in responding to your queries. This can then become a useful benchmark. You can reject those who take too long to answer.
Finally you need to test connectivity. Visit a few sites hosted on the servers of companies that you have short listed. Check the download speeds. Eliminate ones that take too long to open. You should also check on the web hosting review site whether they have any uptime statistics. This will also give you a good idea what type of downtime your website might experience.
Be careful not to select on price only - cheapest is not always the best! Rather look at the average prices and go for a hosting provider that rather offers a middle of the road type of price rather than the absolute cheapest. Another important point to look out for is to see how long the company has been in business!
Both Christopher Buckley & Christine Anderssen are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.
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