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8 Common Web Hosting Mistakes – And How To Avoid Them
While there's never any guarantee of finding the perfect web host, here’s what NOT to do… 1. Relying on online reviews and testimonials – The vast majority of online reviews are written by affiliate marketers who stand to financially benefit from recommending certain hosting companies, others are written by the hosting companies themselves. Online reviews and testimonials should always be taken with a healthy dose of skepticism. Instead, base your choice on a wide variety of other sources, such as blogs, hosting directories and general web hosting discussion forums in addition to online reviews. Seek out comments made by actual users of the service as they tend to be more reliable. 2. Selecting a Free web hosting service – Free hosting can be a good option for a personal or hobby website, but certainly not for anything serious or commercial. Free websites offer a basic hosting service, but often require advertising banners to be placed on your web pages and do not let you to use your own domain name. Without a unique and distinct domain name it is difficult to gain a respectable business identity in the online world. Websites with banner ads are also commonly perceived as cheap and lacking in credibility. Don't skimp on costs here, go with a professional web hosting company if you are serious about building a business or a respectable website that continues to grow. 3. Selecting by price – To stay viable, a web hosting company must offer an attractive price plan for their services, but in order to make a profit, a host must cut cost in other areas, whether by spending less money on support, or by introducing hidden charges later on. Avoid selecting a service by price alone. The real cost of a cheap hosting service is bound to catch up with you eventually. 4. Selecting by Unlimited Bandwidth and Disk Space – Your website might be popular enough that it attracts tens of thousands of visitors each day, but most likely it will not. If this is the case, choose an affordable shared hosting plan and don’t worry too much about wild claims of unlimited bandwidth and disk storage. It's just marketing hype and you will rarely require what they are offering in their sales pitches. 5. Not knowing your requirement – Even if you don’t know much about web hosting, it is extremely helpful to at least try and make a list of your initial and possible future needs before shopping around. Ensure you know how much disk storage space, traffic bandwidth, technologies, databases and number of domains you require. Some hosts will offer a free domain name. Others require you to register a domain name elsewhere, be aware of this. 6. Skimping on quality 24/7 support – Support is something you hardly ever think about until you need it. If your site goes down, you will want to get it back up and running as soon as possible (especially if your site is earning considerable revenue). If your host’s support staff take days to respond, you be in deep trouble! Support is not something that can be easily quantified on the host's sales page, so how do you know if their support is up to scratch? There are a couple of simple check you can do - first look at the support page on their website. Is it clear and intuitive? Does it provide a sizeable FAQ or knowledge base to address common issues? - next contact the support team via an email and on the phone and see what sort of response you get. How you are treated now is likely how you will be handled when you are a paying customer. If emails take more than a couple of days to get a response, or if you’re placed in a lengthy queue when you phone it’s a big red flag. If they don’t have a telephone number run for the hills! 7. Keeping all websites under a single account – There are pros and cons of doing this, while it can be much cheaper to choose a host that supports hosting of multiple domains, in a worst case scenario and the host’s server goes down, you will find all your websites offline in one hit. Spreading your sites among different web hosting companies will avoid this risk, but is more costly and time consuming, so consider your cost/risk preferences. 8. Relying on host backups – Some web hosts may claim to do backups of their servers, but ask yourself, do you trust your vital data to some webhost? While there is no reason not to believe your web host will not do what they say, it's best not to take chances. Make a backup schedule and stick to it. You cannot put a price on peace of mind! Article Directory: http://www.articledashboard.com To learn much more about the ins and outs of web hosting and design, visit WebHostingInformant.com, where you'll learn about the different types of Web Hosts, get help with Finding a Web Host and learn what it really takes to get on the internet. |
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