Choosing a Good Host for Your Site When You Don’t Know What ISP Means
Even to the seasoned pro, finding a good host can be tough. Money is not the way to choose a good host in Cyberspace.
There are nearly as many hosts in Cyberspace as there are search engines. So how do you pick the right one?
At such places as windows hosting, many hosting products and services appear on the pages on the site, but they are well organized and clearly up with the times considering that they offer VPS servers, something that is by no means a common choice with most hosts.
They have plans for any budget and they are very helpful in choosing the right hosting package for you, even if leading you through the choices on a self-guided tour.
When looking for a host, one should consider the following:
How much disk space and bandwidth do they offer in each package. Bandwidth is how many megabytes of information flowed from the disk on the server through the cables to a client computer. With the various plans, if you exceed disk space or bandwidth, you get charged extra. So, if your site needs only 1GB of disk space now and has 50MB of bandwidth, but you’re going to be changing or adding to the site, it’s best to go with the next higher package.
The all-important Control Panel. Does the host you’re evaluating have one and how intuitive is it? It’s here that you can change user names and passwords, change, add or delete email addresses (most of the big hosts offer fifty to 100 email addresses for company employees if you select them as your host). If you need more, you have to buy them. But look into the Control Panel if they have examples to see if you understand it’s power and how it works.
It’s here, too that you can check your traffic. You want to find a host that will allow you to track all of your metrics. Some hosts, even good ones, will give you a look at the number of visitors you have, but you need to know much more than that. What pages were visited the most and least, how many Page Views there were, where are your visitors coming from and what sites are sending them to you. To get that, you often have to pay an additional monthly charge. If you find a host that includes them free, that is ideal.
If you are going to create an e-mailing list, make sure that the service you are evaluating has MySQL, and tutorials for them. Having access to these and tutorials is very important.
In the final analysis, cost may be a factor. Just make certain that you are getting the disk space and bandwidth you need, that you can check all of your metrics: Unique Visits, Page Views, Sites linking to yours, who is referring traffic to you and what keywords are being searched to find your site. Without metrics, your site will be like a ship in the Atlantic with no sextant of GPS.
