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Posts Tagged ‘web host’

If you are looking to place info on-line then there plenty of free ways to do it. However, unless you wish to be at the mercy of someone else and risk your information being lost forever, then free hosting is unquestionably not the best way to go. Take a look at Geocities for example. Many years ago it was one of the biggest sites on the net and offered free hosting to just about everybody that needed it. Now it’s being closed down and anyone that doesn’t move their web site is likely to lose their data and years of painstaking work.

If you want to avoid losing everything you’ve got built up then you need to be master of your own destiny, which ultimately means owning your own domain and having your own hosting account. But how straightforward is it to seek out good hosting? Should you go for a shared hosting account? Or what about cheap dedicated hosting? Selecting low-cost reliable hosting can be minefield of difficulties. Lets have a look at a number of things that you need take into account when checking around…

One of the most important things to consider is whether the web hosting company you are considering offers a hosting package that really meets your needs. Nowadays most hosting firms are pretty generous when it comes to the disk allocation that they provide you with. The times of 5MB hosting accounts seem to be well behind us, but it’s still one thing that you need to check. Is the prospective hosting firm offering you enough disk space now, and enough to fulfill the longer term growth of your site? If your website was to grow beyond your expectations are you able to buy further disk space cheaply, or can you upgrade to their next hosting package up from yours at a low cost?

Bandwidth is another vital consideration. There are two camps that hosting companies seem to have split into. Those who supply a fixed amount of bandwidth for your money, and those who offer unlimited bandwidth. I said ‘seem to’ for the reason that in reality there’s no such thing as unlimited bandwidth. For people who have got the time, it is well worth reading the small print before signing up to any packages that are offering unlimited disk space or unlimited bandwidth. Both disk space and bandwidth cost the hosting firm and it is usually the most competitive and lowest price hosts that supply these ‘unlimited’ packages, sometimes for costs like $3.95 per month. That simply is not a sustainable business model, and customers that attempt to take advantage of either the unlimited disk space or bandwith can quickly discover that they will be required to either move to a higher cost hosting package, or move their hosting to a different company.