An excellent website or online business can be rendered useless by a bad web hosting service. If you do not have prior programming experience, many of the options and add-ons will not make much sense and can make web hosting seem much more confusing than it really is. Often, rather than dive into the problem, people just go with whatever seems to work. While that may be the easy way out, this article can help you make an informed decision.
Dedicated or shared hosting, which one is right for you? If you run a large website with a lot of traffic, a shared server might limit you and lead to a lot of downtime. If this is the case, then you definitely want to look into going with a dedicated host.
Be sure that you register your domain’s name using a different company than your web host in case there’s some kind of disagreement between the two of you. This way you can still have the domain name, and can put the site on a different server. Your hosting provider will control the registration of your domain instead of you.
Sign up for monthly billing for hosting rather than paying in advance for longer service terms. It is impossible to know how good business will be in the later months. The quality of the hosting service could decline or your site could expand so much that you have to move it to another server. Unless your host offers your money back if you do not complete your year-long agreement, go with a monthly subscription.
To avoid throwing away your hard-earned profits, choose your hosting provider very carefully. You can be asked to pay as little as $1 per month to hundreds or thousands for your own dedicated server, but the least expensive ones can often prove the most reliable. The more expensive sites will probably provide a greater bandwidth, but that doesn’t necessarily translate to less downtime for your site.
Identify the positives and negatives of the hosting plans you’ve gathered information on. Even if you are locked into a contract with your host, there are still plenty of things you can do to prepare for the move. Don’t let a contract prevent you from planning your steps for a change.