6 Most Important Factors to choose in Web host

Make a Google search for online reviews of the web hosting provider you’re considering for your website and you’ll realize one thing before even making your website live for the first time- There is no single web host with unanimously positive reviews out there.  Not even those who charge  humongous price for their services. Ask any three customers  who have used the same Web hosting company and chances are very high that you’ll get extremely different opinions. Why?

Because there is no such thing as a ‘Perfect Web host’. Every web host has it’s own pluses and minuses; what matters is how good it is for you-and that totally depends on the kind of website you want to host and the kind of services you need.  To help you find the right web hosting provider for your website here are some of the most vital features you should look for.

Know yourself. Decide what you want.

There are a gazillion web hosts out there and each one of  them has their own characteristics. So to take the first step, think of your requirements- what do you want from a web host? What is your budget? What can you afford- a high,  medium , or  low price hosting? What kind of support do you need from the web host?  Do you want a website only to have fun and share ideas with your family/friends or you  want one for your  business? Free web hosts will be fine to have fun,  but if you want a website for business, you need quality, and for quality, you need money. After all, you cannot expect  top-notched support if you only pay around 7$  a month.

If you’ve a  small businesses which attracts relatively  light traffic and sales , you should go for shared web hosting.  If  you run an ecommerce business, you may want to check out a Virtual Private Server. And if you’ve a high traffic ecommerce site that gets heavy traffic and does thousands of dollars of business per month, dedicated hosting is the way to go. This infographic will give you a better idea on the type of web hosing service that is best suitable for you.

What type of Web Hosting is Best for You

Also, don’t forget to weigh your wallet before making a final decision. If your purse strings are drawn tight, go for the most economical option, because expensive doesn’t necessary mean good.

Customer Service

As I said before, all web hosting companies are more or less the same- their real litmus test is their ability to put things back in place when they go haywire.  An ideal Web hosting company provides good, fast, reliable customer service, 24/7, via email, telephone and live chat.

But then again, every company will say it does. So how do you know which one to trust? Take them for a test drive.  Call their help desk and see how long you’re kept on hold, what’s the quality of online chat, how knowledgeable and friendly their staff is  and how much their response time is  for emails. Go for a web hosting provider you can call at 3 in the night and expect to have your problems rectified. 

How is their interface?

You don’t want to find yourself your host every time you want to add/change something on your website. You should be able to manage all the facets of your site at a single place, and for that, you need a good online management system. Every single company out there offers at least a month of trial period (if they don’t, it’s a red flag). So before you buy, see how comfortable you feel with their user interface, control panel etc. And as I said before, you cannot expect to make changes to your website yourself if you wish to pay only 6-7 $ a month.

Uptime and backup

Importance of backup in choosing a good web hosting provider.

Do your Research-Make sure you don’t run in a similar situation.

A decent web hosting company  should promise a certain level of uptime- the minimum being 99.5% . And incase it fails to deliver it,  there should be some sort of refund. This puts at least a little onus on the company to make sure that their servers are up and running.

You should also check  how often the Web hosting company performs backups. In case your website gets hacked, you want your data safe at least till 2-3 days back. Ask the company about their disaster recovery plan too- if there is a fire, earthquake, flood or any other natural disaster-what’s their backup plan?

Scalability

You business may be small right now thus making you go for shared hosting, but you might need VPS hosting soon once your business grows. Make sure that the hosting company allows an ease of  upgrade to a different plan.

That said, also stay few feet away from companies who push to sell you more services than you need in order to mint some easy cash. As I said in the first step, know exactly what your needs are.

Wrapping things up!

In addition to the points listed above, always check the reputation of your provider online. As I said, be prepared for a wide range of opinions and weigh them on basis of your need. 

For further details:

 SPV Host - Hosting Provider You Can Tust

http://spvhost.com/

US Toll Free Phone: +1-866-841-6141

UK Phone: +44-12-2580-8659

AU Phone: +61-2-6108-4354

TOP 3 IMPORTANT TIPS

Everyone wants to be online these days. If you aren’t, chances are you will be forgotten. Unless you’re in a niche that word of mouth can solely keep you afloat, it’s time to think about getting your site up. This article will hopefully help you through the clutter of setting up a website and help you focus in on what you really need to claim your spot online.

Starting your website tip 1:

When choosing your domain it’s best to select one that is short and to the point. If you own a bakery for example, by this point www.bakery.com is spoken for. However if you last name is Smith or your bakery has an individual name like Blue Hill Bakery, you can try Smithbakery.com or Bluehillbakery.com. Most hosting companies have a tool to help you figure out if the domain you want is already taken, but my favorite is www.instantdomainsearch.com. It’s simple and gives you suggestions on available .net .org etc. variations on your domain search. The shorter the domain the better, not only with this help with people remembering your domain, but it can’t hurt your organic page rank either. Also, make sure that your provider offers unlimited subdomains. Most do without question, but double check before buying, otherwise you could spend a lot more then you should for a site with only a few pages.

Starting your website tip 2:

Usually when you purchase a domain with a provider, chances are you’ll use their hosting services too. You can aim your site from a domain host to a site provider, but if you’re just starting out it may be wiser to host the site and domain with the same company. Depending on the function of the site, be it a blog, corporate, or retail site, you’ll need to decide your storage space and bandwidth allotments. If your site is going to have multimedia you may want to bump up these selections. I’ve found that it’s much easier to back down your package after a test month then it is to have your site crash or be billed for the overages. Once you have an idea of what the site is going to be, within your accounts Control Panel, or cpanel, there should be many options offered by your provider to help you install the needed Content Management Programs on your hosting server. Little tip, I’ve found that WordPress is the most efficient when it comes to blogging, but Joomla is the best I’ve found when setting up a retail site. Both are very easy to dive into and are very robust, but Joomla seems to have better options when it comes to shopping carts.

Starting your website tip 3:

Traffic and tracking are the bread and butter of the internet. Being able to drive customers and track what brought them there is the name of the game. There are many options when it comes to these topics, but I’ll give you what I’ve found to be the best options to start you out.

When it comes to analytics, Google is a staple. You can sign up for a Google Analytics account for free, and they will walk you through the set up process. Be sure to have access to the HTML code on your site because you’re going to have to place some Google code to allow the analytics to gather information. There are other options out there, many of them, but Google does an excellent job of tracking all information and seems to be the default in the industry.

Now, the age old question of “how do I get traffic”? I won’t go into too much detail hear because to be honest there is just too much to write about, but I will clue you in on the basics depending on your end goal. If you own a retail site and you’re pushing a product, your best bet out of the gate is to buy targeted traffic for your site. Be very careful, you really do pay for what you get. You can buy very cheap traffic and never have a sale, or you can overpay for targeted traffic that converts. If you have the budget, stick to targeted, if not, try a mix, but all cheap is definitely not the way to go. If you’re a blogger looking to drive traffic organically, well there are volumes written on this topic. What I suggest in the beginning stages is to make sure your topics are relevant and articles filled with great keywords. But more importantly starting out are links. Once you get some content, go out and find similar sites to yours and try to do a link share with them. The more links back to your site, the better your ranking will become.

I hope this gives you a good idea of what to look for when starting a new site. Be sure to ask questions. Most providers have large staffs waiting to help customers. If you find a good rep ask for their name and see if you can reach them directly if you get stuck. It’s a learning process, use all you can to help teach yourself. Once you get it down, you’ll look back a realize it really wasn’t that big of a deal to carve out your spot on the net.

For further details:

SPV Host - Hosting Provider You Can Tust

http://spvhost.com/

US Toll Free Phone: +1-866-841-6141

UK Phone: +44-12-2580-8659

AU Phone: +61-2-6108-4354

An Easy Guide about Website Hosting

What is web hosting anyway? What do I get when I buy a web hosting solution?
To make thing clear from start let’s just say how it all works.

Web Hosting – Made Simple
Web pages basically consist of text and images. Generically, the information contained by these files is called content. The look of the web page is called design.
In order to be accessible to online users, all these files must be stored on a web server. You can think of web servers as computers storing the files of tens or hundreds of web sites. These computers are all connected to the Internet through high-speed connection. When you access a web page, your browser connects to the web server that stores that page and downloads it to your computer.
So a web server is a must when you plan to share your web site content with online users via the Internet. There are thousands of web servers in the world, and there are companies that own them. Such a company is called web-hosting provider.
A web-hosting provider can have dozens of web servers hosting thousands of web sites. The web server computers are found usually in large numbers and are all housed in special buildings or sections of buildings called data center. Apart from the high-speed Internet connection, these locations are set up to ensure the optimum operational conditions and security for the web servers. HVAC (Heating, Ventilation, & Air Conditioning) control, fire protection, virus protection, data backup facility, power backup, even autonomy in case of disaster. Another term for the web servers in the data center is a web farm.
To be able to run your site properly you need a space on the web server to store your data and an Internet connection to it. The amount of data available to you on a web server is simply referred as space and is usually quantified in MB. The Internet connection needed so that your web site can be accessed online is referred as bandwidth and is also measured in MB or even GB.
Having the glimpse of the basics, it must be said that different web-hosting providers offer different space and bandwidth. Space and bandwidth are usually the main characteristics of a web-hosting plan.
The terminology associated with web hosting can be quite dazzling: virtual web hosting, dedicated hosting; co-locating hosting, shared hosting reseller hosting.

Shared Web Hosting

Shared web hosting or virtual web hosting are two terms for the same thing. Shared web hosting means that on a web server are hosted many web sites that all have a defined quota of HDD space and bandwidth. They all run simultaneously and there can be from hundreds to thousands of web sites on the same web server. Given the high number of web sites should you worry about exceeding the performance of the web server, issue better known as slow server response, meaning that your visitors will have to wait too long for your web pages to load.
That is usually not a real problem when dealing with serious web hosting providers, because the operational parameters of the web servers are monitored and appropriate actions will be taken in order to maintain the level of service contracted.
The greater number of web sites sharing the resources of a web server (HDD space, bandwidth, memory, CPU time), the web hosting provider can afford to offer its services at a lower cost. A minus would be that, even with high level of service, you will have to accept a slower server response time when choosing shared web hosting.

Reseller Web Hosting
When web-hosting providers offer their services, typically with a discount, to a third-party (a reseller that will thus become a web-hosting provider itself) and the latter subsequently offers web-hosting services under his branding. Indeed technically the reseller web hosting is very similar to shared web hosting, as many web sites end up sharing space and bandwidth on the same web server. The resellers usually are web designers or web developers who offer web hosting services as part of their integrated services. As the web-hosting provider offers resellers important discounts, the price they can offer is among the smallest in the industry.
Compared with the shared web hosting, this system has technical support problem. It takes time and communication problems may occur on the course of your problem from the reseller to the web-hosting provider. Unless your site is a personal web site or non-commercial one, this poor support issue is enough to not consider this your primary option.
Continuing this line of thought, how can you distinguish a reseller from a real web-hosting provider? It’s not the professional design of the web site, not even the support contact facilities offered as may resellers might have contracts with the provider on the technical support and the person taking your calls might be working for the provider and identify himself to you as an employee of the reseller. Solid company information is made available usually only by serious providers. The price, that can get as low as under 5$/month is another hint, but you should consider it carefully with prices dropping through the industry.

Dedicated Web Hosting
In dedicated web hosting one single web server is rented to a single customer.
Although this is the common belief, web-hosting providers usually divide a single web server computer between up to three customers. On the other hand there are web-hosting providers that actually give an entire web server to a customer. Even with three customers sharing the web server, the dedicated web hosting option offers the customers the option to host more than one web site, configure the software to best meet the needs of his site or scale the available bandwidth.
The high prices combined with the availability of resources recommend this type of web hosting for highly important web sites such as e-commerce sites.

Co-location Web Hosting
Co-locating web hosting is similar with dedicated web hosting.
The main difference is that while in dedicated web hosting the web server computer belongs to the web-hosting provider and is only rented by the customer, in co-locating web hosting the customer owns the web server computer. The web-hosting provider only houses the web server computer and sells bandwidth to the customer. This gives the customer using co-locating web hosting full control of the web server combined with the security of the data center.


For further details:

SPV Host - Hosting Provider You Can Tust
http://spvhost.com/
US Toll Free Phone: +1-866-841-6141
UK Phone: +44-12-2580-8659
AU Phone: +61-2-6108-4354