As with everything, the best one is probably a recommended one.  If you haven’t got a recommendation then the internet can be a valuable resource as long as your research is structured.  Jump on and type ‘web [...]]]>

There are as many hosts as there are stars in the night sky!  How can you choose one?

As with everything, the best one is probably a recommended one.  If you haven’t got a recommendation then the internet can be a valuable resource as long as your research is structured.  Jump on and type ‘web hosting’ into a search engine.  For me that only returned 225 MILLION hits!

Look at a few pricing structures.  Some will offer ‘Unlimited disk space’ (read file storage).  Some will offer ‘Unlimited Bandwidth’ (read amount of data that can be transferred to/from your site).  Some will offer packages that give a fixed amount of one or the other or both.  There are price/option decisions to be made at this point, but most hosts should be flexible enough to allow you to swap pricing/features plan.  Think about where you want your files hosted.  They can be anywhere in the world.  This is technology and everything is done remotely.  In fact your host may well have never even seen the physical hardware they sell space on, or indeed, even own it!

But price isn’t everything.  Think about the downsides as well.  Low cost probably means that you are sharing a server, probably with 10s if not 100s of other companies.  If one of those writes a bit of web code that isn’t very good, it may tie up your server, causing it to run slowly and take ages to present even the simplest of web sites to your visitor.  Your host should be monitoring this kind of thing, but it’s reactive, you may have already missed that new customer because your site wouldn’t load before they get it fixed.  It’s a trade off.  At some point in time you may need some support.  If the hosting company isn’t in your time zone then questions could take a while to answer.  If the hosting company plans an upgrade ‘out-of-hours’ will it be out of your hours, or right in the middle of your prime web site viewing time?  For these reasons alone it may be worth having your site hosted in your country if possible, not to mention language barriers (trust me, I manage a team split in the UK and India, language and custom is a much larger barrier than everyone says).

So, find a host, and then search for some reviews about them.  Make an informed decision, but it’s not the end of the world if you have issues – you can move your web site quite easily between hosts. For your info Sara was introduced to her host through a networking event – TwentyHost, and is on their Shared UK Hosting Plan.  It gives her site 150MB of storage space (including email storage, but this can me moved off-line), 2.25GB of Bandwidth/month and up to 25 unique email addresses, more than enough, for now.

Once you have your host – link  them to your domain name using the DNS Lookup on your domain control panel.  Your new host should have given you the names of their ‘Names Servers’, you need to enter these into your domain control panel ‘Names Servers’ section.  As if by magic (well, over a couple of days – the internet is a big place you know and word needs to get around!) your domain name is linked to your hosted space.

In my final post in this series I’ll be looking at possible ways of creating some content for your new site.

If you would like Above Parr PA Services to help you create your web presence, contact Sara.