Launching Your New Website?
So, you have finished your new website, it has everything potential clients need to know about your company, but how do you get your site on the web so people around the world can view it? Some companies have the financial budgets to have their own dedicated servers and permanent high speed Internet connection, but most people find that they need a website hosting company to get their website up and running on the World Wide Web.
What is Website Hosting?
Web Hosts are companies that have their own powerful computers with perpetual Internet connection. They rent clients space on their servers for the uploading and management of website files. Once uploaded, these files, HTML pages, images, and other documents, are only accessible through an Internet address or domain name. The domain name, for example compila.com, bbc.co.uk, google.co.uk etc must be registered through an approved domain registration company and is linked to your files at the web hosting company. When someone enters your domain into their browser, their ISP uses it to find your files and your host will display them to your website visitor.
Choosing a Web Host
There are thousands of hosting companies around the globe for you to choose and all offering a huge array of options. They can be broken down into two basic categories—free hosting and paid hosting. They both have their pros and cons, which should be weighed by any website owner, paying careful attention to your own site’s specific hosting needs and goals.
Free hosting has the resistless lure of being free of cost, but most free hosts place restrictions and requirements on these plans which can be detrimental to the success of your site. The biggest flaw of free hosting, is in the vast majority of cases, you will be required to place adverts on your website. This can distract from your site’s main content and create a break in the flow of traffic through links away from your site. Free hosting often limits the amount of web space you can have and low bandwidth, can stop visitors seeing your website.
Paid hosting has the major disadvantage of being an expense to your business, but the amount will depend on the hosting package chosen. Usually, the more expensive the hosting package, the more space, bandwidth, and extra features you will receive, though this isn’t a hard and fast rule—it’s always prudent to shop before you buy. The extra features most usually offered in these expanded hosting packages can include multiple domain and sub-domain names, site creation tools, blogging, email accounts, and ecommerce platforms. The good thing for you is the website hosting industry is highly competitive, and therefore the prices you now have to pay have been driven down drastically over the last 5 – 10 years.
The Key Factor In Website Hosting Is Reliability
There is no doubt in today’s world of technology that having a website is essential to any business, be it large or small. For those who require web hosting, finding the right host for your website is critical to the success of your site.
Whatever hosting package you choose, from free to wildly expensive the key factor is reliability. Customers must be able to find your site easily and have it available to them whenever they choose to visit. If a site causes difficulties for the customer or isn’t available all the time, they will soon be visiting your competitor.
So please don’t rush a decision, get recommendations, do your research, make a shortlist of 3 to 4 web hosts, and test them before you buy.
Neat article. Thanks Harvey. I’m getting ready to host and launch a new site and there are jsut so many things to consider. Your article took my stress level down a knotch, it was a good read. You are right, I need to find someone who will be reliable. If the company I host with goes down, my whole site will go down which will NOT be good! Again, thanks Harv!