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What happens when your website is not available? Does your potential customer simply wait until later and then try again? Chances are they will just move to the next business which will benefit from your bad luck.
The temptation can be to go for the cheapest deal in finding a web hosting service but, as so often in life, you generally get what you pay for. Every business website has its own unique set of requirements and most web hosts will have a web hosting package that will suit your business needs. But to maintain customer loyalty and trust, it is essential to choose the right one.
Free web hosting
It is possible to get free web hosting deals
but the quality of your website will suffer from pop ups and banner
ads. Finding a free web host without all the advertising may not be
such good news either as, without the income to cover the cost of
running their server, many of these hosts can close down. Plus, more
often than not with a free web host, your website will not have the
benefit of a personally selected, unique domain name (e.g.
www.yourname.com) and will have to use a sub domain (e.g.
www.freeservice.com/yourname/). Other disadvantages of free web hosting
include a limited web space page, the inability to add interactive
features, such as message boards and online purchasing, and, worst of
all, search engines tend to ignore free hosted websites.
Cheap web hosting
When
searching for a cheap web host you should be aware that this could be a
false economy. Eventually, there could be higher, hidden costs for your
website. Since some cheap web hosts can have hundreds of websites
running on each web server, this can ultimately affect the performance
in terms of slow load times, outages, limited space and security risks.
Can you really afford to lose potential customers as a result of a
breach in security or system down time?
Quality web hosting
Quality website hosting will make certain that a limited number of websites
are being hosted on each web server in facilities that ensure your
website will still be running in the event of any power failure. Look for information on uptime rates that the web hosting service offers. You will find this information on a good comparison site or maybe on
hosting forums.
Two of the most important aspects of any website
plan are the amount of disk space your domain is allocated (the amount
of file space your web site will occupy on the web host's server), and
the amount of your monthly bandwidth usage allowance (also known as
traffic or data transfer).
The more space there is available
on the web server, the more scalability your website can have as your
online presence expands. As your traffic requirements grow over time,
as your website receives more visitors, your website will use more
bandwidth so it is important to be aware of any charges that might be
incurred by exceeding your bandwidth allowance. Beware of any web host
promising “unlimited bandwidth”; the host still has to pay for the
bandwidth and, if you use a lot of it, they will have to charge you for
it.
Just as important will be the level of technical support
that you can expect. If your business depends on your website, you need
peace of mind that someone is there to help you quickly. Find out what
the availability is and average response time is of your potential web
host’s support service.
At the end of the day, Google gives
more credence to long established websites when ranking them in its
search results, so why shouldn’t you when looking for a web host for
your business? It makes good business sense to choose an established
company that you can trust, which has a tried and tested formula for
successful performance and reliability.
If you're going to spend time on anything, taking the time to find quality, affordable web hosting is a solid investment.
Read more about our quality web hosting solutions
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