| When it comes to picking a website hosting provider, | | | | Management Solution (wordpress, drupal, etc), a |
| there are many seemingly contradictory things to | | | | forum, all with one click. |
| consider. How do you know that the website hosting | | | | 4. Do they have 24/7 tech support? Is it included in |
| provider that you are picking has the features that | | | | the hosting price? Is the support via chat, phone or |
| you need and want? What types of features should | | | | email? If it's 2 in the morning, and you bring down |
| you look for in a web host? | | | | your site because you were doing things in your |
| You want to get the most features for the lowest | | | | MySQL databases, you want to know that you can |
| amount of money, but price should not be the only | | | | call/chat or email someone at any time of the day or |
| driving factor in picking a host. Here are 5 things that | | | | night for help. |
| you want to consider when picking a hosting | | | | 5. How much bandwidth will you have? Some hosting |
| provider: | | | | providers are now offering unlimited bandwidth, |
| | | | whereas others offer metered bandwidth. Make sure |
| 1. You want 99.9% uptime guarantee. Yes, I realize | | | | that you buy enough bandwidth to sustain your site, |
| that it seems somewhat redundant, but a lot of | | | | but not so much bandwidth that you'll never use it all. |
| hosting providers will not specifically guarantee this. | | | | Bonus Tip Find out about data backups. Does the |
| You want to make sure that they have redundant | | | | webhost perform regular backups of your data or |
| power supplies, backup generators and are in a | | | | are you responsible for backups? In the event of a |
| secured facility. | | | | catastrophic event, think hurricane Katrina, you want |
| 2. You want to have cPanel. Which stands for control | | | | to be sure that your data is safe and secure. |
| panel,which is an application that lets you manage and | | | | There was a case in Texas where the driver of a |
| control all aspects of your site. Not all hosting | | | | van lost control of the van and drove through the |
| providers give you cPanel, so you need to make sure | | | | wall of a webhosting provider damaging some server |
| and ask for it before making a decision. | | | | racks that had customer data and websites on them. |
| 3. You want to have fantastico scripts. Fantastico | | | | The hosting provider was in charge of backups, and |
| scripts has the installer scripts for all the major | | | | because of their uptime guarantee none of the |
| applications that people use on their websites. With | | | | customer sites on the affected servers went down. |
| fantastico you can usually install a Content | | | | You want service like that. |