Finding the Right Website Hosting Service to Meet Your Needs

In order for a business or personal website to be on the Internet where it can be seen by people all over the world, a website hosting service is needed. A Website hosting service is a company that provides space on a server and internet connections to the client so they can get their website up and running and seen by other people from their computers, tablets, and smart phones. There are a number of different web hosting services to choose from and a number of different web hosting packages as well. In fact, it can be quite confusing finding the right service to meet your specific needs. Here are a few tips on what you should look for when choosing a website hosting service.

Does the Service Have a Variety of Packages to Choose From?
The first thing you need to look at is the types of packages that the web hosts have available to choose from. Most web hosting sites offer everything from free web hosting for small personal sites, to dedicated and cloud hosting. You need to determine, which hosting package best suits your needs and whether or not a particular company offers that type of package. For example free web hosting may be perfect for a personal web page, because the web host makes it money from advertising on your site. However, this is a poor choice for a business site as potential customers don't want to have to wade through thousands of advertisements to find out about your products or services. If you are going to have shared web hosting you need to know how many other websites you will be sharing a server with, the more websites on a single server, the more websites you will have to share resources with. If you are thinking of a dedicated server, which is often used by larger businesses, then you need to know if your server will be managed or unmanaged. 

Percentage of Up Time
Every Website hosting service has down times, do to equipment failure and other problems. However, some web hosts book so many clients or customers that their system can't handle all of the demand and frequently goes down. When a Website hosting service goes down, then your site is not on the Internet, and it can't be seen by potential customers. The more downtime a web hosting site has, the more business you are losing. So look for a hosting service that has a small percentage of down time, so that you can ensure that you can be seen any time of the day or the night with as little interruptions in service as possible.

Cost
You also want to look at the cost of the hosting package and make sure it is in keeping with what other companies are charging. A hosting package that is priced a lot higher than the average package or one that is priced far lowers for the same package should be a red flag that there is something going on with this particular hosting service. While there may be a few dollars difference from one company to another, a huge difference in rates over the standard or average fee charged by the industry probably means you should look for another hosting company.

A little thought and research prior to choosing your hosting company, could result in your finding a company you are happy with for many years to come.