What is Web Hosting?
Web hosting (webhosting) is a service provided by companies that will help you host your web pages so that other internet users can find them on the internet. Webhosting companies will usually provide some ways for us to upload our files to their hosting sites.
Some of the best webhosting companies will provide you with many other features. It is important that you find a webhosting company that can support Web 2.0 so that you can have a feature rich website.
How do other internet users find my site? The importance of Domain Name.
On top of uploading your files to a webhosting companies, You can register for a domain name. Other internet users will find your site based on domain name that you have. If you are not particular about having individualized and meaningful domain names, you can find lots of webhosting companies that provide you with free subdomains.
An example of free subdomain is easyaffiliatemarketingguide.wordpress.com the main domain is actually wordpress.com and easyaffiliatemarketingguide is what i registered with wordpress. Wordpress is a place where you can get a website started in a very short period of time, within a couple of minutes, it is one of the most popular site which support Web 2.0. The only draw back that i can see is that there are some restrictions on advertising and more advance functionalities if you website is hosted with them.
If you would like to have your own domain name like www.tzeyong.com you can register for a domain name at any of the domain registrar available. Most top webhosting companies will provide you with free domain names. So make sure you check out and decide which company you want to go with for your webhosting before registering a domain name.
At the time of writing, Go Daddy has some good offer of only $1.99 for domain names
GoDaddy.com $1.99 Domain Names
Another company that have relatively affordable domain names
and webhosting is Dotster.com. Low cost domain
registration, plus hosting and building solutions. Dotster does it all!
Reminder to check out and decide your webhosting company and only register a domain name if your webhosting company is not providing you with free domains.
Whatever your decision, remember that you should try to get domain names that are meaningful, short, easy to spell and remember.
What to look out for in webhosting companies? Six main
criteria of choosing the right webhosting company.
This would really depends on what you want to have a website for. Is it for a company? Or is it your personal site? Are you going to upload lots of multimedia files and photos? Or are you mainly using it for text based pages? This would ranges from 10 Gigabytes for personal text based pages to 300 Gigabyte for businesses.
2. How much bandwidth is provided?For all the different webhosting plans that a company offer. You will have to decide on the bandwidth that you requires. This closely relate to your disk space usage. If you are planning to have lots of multimedia on your website. It would be better to get a plan with higher bandwidth allowance. Typlical bandwidth limits starts from 300 GB for a basic webhosting plan up to 3,000 GB for a business webhosting plan.
3. What kind of support will be provided?Because you would need to remotely administer your website. It is important to consider the kind of support that your webhosting company has. Is the support 24 hours, 7 days a week? What are the forms of support? Toll free phone? Email support is a norm nowadays.
4. Reliability of the webhosting service?What is the uptime promise? With todays advancement in server technologies, uptime of 99.9% are often provided by some of the web best webhosting firms.
5. Pricing of webhosting plans?With the number of webhosting companies increasing, webhosting plans now are very competitive. Most basic plan offerred by webhosting companies ranges from $5 to $10 per month. Anything more than that would be kind of a rip off.
A very important point about price plan for your consideration is that it is a recurring fee that you need to pay per month (or annually). Some webhosting companies would give you very good discount initially, however, if the monthly fees are higher that the rest, in the long run you are actually at the losing end.
6. What are the freebies that the webhosting company is going to provide?This is actually a very important point. No matter what is the purpose of your website, the bottomline is that you would like to draw traffic to your website. There is no easier way than using pay per click advertising through search networks. Some top webhosting firm will actually give you free credits vouchers to be used in the search network.
Another consideration is if the webhosting firm supports the latest web technology. In recent years, Web 2.0 has slowly became the de facto standard which good webhosting firm will support.
Recommendations?
Based on the above criterias. I have found 2 of the best webhosting companies that offers very competitive webhosting plans.
1 & 1 hosting provide a wide range of comprehensive
webhosting packages. Regardless if you are a beginner or a
company looking for webhosting solution, 1 & 1 will have a
suitable webhosting plan for you. They provide lots of
freebies like vouchers for search engines and have support for some of
the latest web technologies available. Choose
1&1 for Free: domains, marketing tools,
search engine ad $$, free software. Must See Monthly Specials!
The other webhosting company that is worth mentioning is
ANhosting. Their mega plan all inclusive webhosting provides
for great flexiblity and ease of use. Freebies are comparable to what 1
& 1 hosting offers. You will find AN hosting easy to
use even if you are a first timer! No Hidden
Charges. No Setup Fees. All inclusive Webhosting. Powerful award
winning webhosting
