24 Jul 10 3 Things to Look for Before Buying a Web Hosting Account

You have a great idea, an appropriate solution for your customers’ problems, and you got it converted in an award-winning product that any newbie can put to use. But, you will still fail, if you have not selected a safe, secure, stable, and reliable web hosting company to deploy your solution and website for your customers to access without any delay.

A web host provides you with a foundation for your web-based business to stand on. The quality of foundation will determine how long your business will stand in the situation when you will witness the torrent of traffic to your website.

Choosing a web host company is one of the most important decisions (if the not the most important) you will take in the process of launching any web-based business – be it even a simple blog. In this article, I will talk about 3 things you should look after when buying a web hosting plan.

Disk space and bandwidth

Disk space refers to the storage space you will get on a web hosting server when you buy a plan, and bandwidth refers to the data transmission rate (amount of data transferred in a month from your server to your visitors’ computer when they access your website).

Find a web hosting company that offers maximum disk space and bandwidth at the competitive price. Ideally, you should go with the web hosting company that offers unlimited disk space and bandwidth, for you would not like to be charged when a certain number of people have visited your website, nor you will like your website to remain offline because it has reached certain limit.

Data center

Among other things, the speed at which your website will be delivered to your customer depends upon the proximity of your server to the end user. You should, therefore, pay attention to the fact that where the server is located. Is it located near your customers?

How can you ascertain that?

Well, you can ascertain that by choosing a web hosting company that has globally located data centers. If your web host has a globally located data centers then chances are they may put your website on its server located in India, if bulk of your customers are coming from there.

Support and uptime

No matter how great a web hosting service is, it will at times fail – even Titanic sank. But the beauty and strength of a web hosting company lies in the fact that how it recovers its service like. That is to say how well it fixes the error when you have one.

Go for the web hosting company that has a huge knowlegebase full of articles and tutorials to help you solve your problem on your own, and a knowledgeable support team that responds as soon as they get your question. You need this to ascertain that your website does not remain down for more than couple of minutes.

Talking of the downtime, I must tell you that do not choose a web hosting company that does not guarantee 99.99% uptime.

You should not go for any web hosting company, no matter how hyped it is, if the company fails to meet above criteria.