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By Kamal Hussain
There is more then 40 Million web hoisting provider to choose
from and all of them are thirsty for adding your business to
their portfolio, in this situation how do you identify and
distinguish the best from the worse web hosting providers.
Below I have highlighted some key point to Consider When
Choosing a Web Hosting Provider.
Security
The security of your website is the most important thing to
consider once your site goes live, you should be 100% confident
that the technology that brings your web project to life is of
the highest caliber and extremely secure. If you set your
website to process customer details and collect payments via the
internet then you should consider a hosting provider who can
provide you with a server which has encryption capabilities and
the ability to set up a dedicated secure server if and when
requested by you.
Server Space
Before you commit your self to a hosting provider, first
consider the amount of disk space you will need to host your
website, a reasonable amount is around 500 MB, to 1 GB disk
space, which is sufficient enough for any small business, unless
you are planning on running a software repository or an image
gallery or a file sharing website. Web hosting providers offer
their customers several hosting packages and many of the
packages comes with un-necessary disk space for a very
reasonable price in attempt to out perform their competitors in
many cases I found hosting providers are cutting corners to
bring it customers an excellent hosting package which only looks
good on paper.
Reliability
The reliability of the hosting provider is crucial. The length
of time they have been in business, their percent of uptime,
reasonable uptime you should expect is at least 99.5% and their
backup and data retrieval practices and policies. Some hosting
providers have multiple data centres, and some might even give
you a choice of where your server will be at. Ideally, the
closer the server is to you the better, as file transfers and
interaction with the server will be at faster speeds. This might
be a good question to ask the company on the phone call above.
Support
Technical support is something that should definitely be a part
of a web hosting plan. Professional web hosting providers offer
customers a support ticket system, this support system track all
queries made by you and will automatically notify you via e-mail
or SMS when your query get updated. The support system also
give you access to review the status of any tickets you have
raised, set priorities and check response times.
PHP/CGI-Bin
No matter what type of site you are planning on running,
chances are you will eventually need to install some type of CGI
script. Whether it be a mailing list management script, contact
form processor, or maybe even a fancy credit card processing
script, your hosting account will need to allow you to install
and run them. This requires access to a special folder on your
server called "CGI-Bin". Some hosting accounts will only allow
you to use "pre-installed" scripts as a security measure. These
are scripts that the owners of the company have installed and
configured so that they know that they will work properly and
not adversely affect their server's performance. That may be all
you need, but if you have the knowledge, it's always nice to
have the ability to install your own scripts and configure them
to suit your individual needs. You should also be sure that the
account you choose supports the language in which your scripts
are written, such as PHP, Perl, etc.
About The Author: For more information visit
http://www.freehost
