Wednesday, August 27, 2008

The Web Hosting Decision: How To Choose A Web Host

By Darrel Hawes


If it is time for you to begin your own website, a decision that must be made early on is where your website will be hosted. This refers to where on the internet your website will reside. Just like a family or individual has a place to call home, a website needs a "home" too.

Websites have to sit on a computer somewhere, and the computers which keep websites are called web servers or web hosts.

One choice you will need to make is if you will use a paid web host or a free one.

Using of the free services sounds like a good idea, because not only is the price right, many of them feature easy-to-use web creation tools. Though there are good reasons to use them, you should not do so for your primary sites. Besides showing ads, some of the services are known for deleting your sites for no apparent reason, and there is always the risk of the service shutting down. In either case, you lose the hard work put into building the site.

When you set up your paid web host, you have a few options. You can either purchase it yourself or in the event have engaged the services of a web designer, these professionals will often make web space available to you. Some of the criteria in selecting a web host include:

Price: what is it going to cost you to host the site, not only in base service fees but also for any additional services you may require?

Reliability: does the company have a history of problems with keeping sites up? Try and look beyond the actual out of pocket cost of hosting and gauge what it will cost if your site goes down for any period of time.

Cpanel: make sure the web host uses cpanel for accessing the site to make changes.

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