Thursday, January 13, 2011

How to Pick a Web Host Provider

A website can be utilized for either personal or professional reasons. For personal reasons many people choose to chronicle their lives, blog about something they are interested in or share photos with friends and family. For businesses, a web site is a necessity. In fact, many people these days use the presence of a web site as a method for determining the legitimacy of a company and often they prefer to use the Internet to conduct their business.
Whether looking to enable a web presence for the first time, or if you are simply unhappy with your existing service, you will need to find a web host provider. In order to ensure you have the best possible service there are several items you should consider. When shopping around keep these five important questions in mind:
  1. Reliability: How often will your site be unavailable? Reliability or uptime is of vital importance and something that should be carefully considered before choosing a host. For business websites this is even more important than personal.When a website is down it may be irritating for a personal website but it can translate to hundreds, even thousands of dollars in revenue lost for businesses. Keep in mind, though that claims of 100% uptime are likely not accurate so be wary of these claims. The fact is there are times where there may be an unforeseen problem or scheduled maintenance causing your website to be unavailable for a short period of time.What is important to determine is the actual uptime percentage for the company as a whole as well as the specific server where your website will reside. All web hosts should have this historical data available. You should also determine how scheduled outages are handled. When possible the better web hosts schedule down time well in advance and during non-peak times. With today’s technology there is no excuse for any web host to have a low uptime percentage.  Source webhostinghub  Read More