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Website Hosting Services

Written by Z. Zivanovic, WebsiteDevelopingTricks.com

There is a lot of website hosting services on the net that you can choose from. We've went a long way from old times, when there were just a few website hosting companies available, and the competition in this industry is huge these days. That's a pretty good thing for all end users since there is really a great choice of hosting companies and large number of hosting services offered. During recent years, end users greatly benefited from fast growing website hosting competition and there's definitely a hosting plan with right hosting services for everyone today.

When choosing a hosting plan and hosting services, you should first start from your basic needs. What are you looking for? What type of website you are going to host on that specific hosting provider. Is it one site or more sites that you are going to host? Is there anything specific that you are looking for when it comes to add-ons or do you have any special requests related to your hosting plan? Once you put these answers on a piece of paper you can start looking for your future website hosting provider. If we put aside some special hosting services, here is the basic list of things you should know before you choose a hosting plan:

• Web space needed - Usually in megabytes.
• Traffic (bandwidth) needed - Generally offered 'per-month', but can often be offered as unlimited.
• Is it a shared or dedicated server - Shared means that you are sharing server resources with other users and dedicated means that you have your own server box to play with.
• Is it managed or unmanaged service - Does the hosting service provider provide server managing with your hosting plan (managed) or not (unmanaged).

Each of these instances can be very important for your future work on your sites therefore pay attention when choosing each of them for your future hosting choices. A good practice is to try to predict the future growth of your site and generally always take a bit more than it's needed in the beginning. It's always a better choice to pay a bit more in the start then pay much more later or even worse having to move your site elsewhere because your current host don't have enough resources.

The above list is definitely something to start with. However most of people simply don't take in the account some important things these days which are often very controversial, but from my experience very important these days which all relate to hosting services. I will write more about each of these in the future, but let me give you a quick idea what I am talking about. I think that after having my hosting plans with over 20 companies since 1997, I have a bit of experience in this matter and that my advice will definitely help you with choosing a right hosting service provider. Apart from the above list, one of the most important things is to try to learn as much as possible about your future hosting provider. Among the first things you should try to figure out is how exactly they provide a link between your server and the internet. These links can vary from very serious hosts with multiple carriers with managed performance optimization to those with just one carrier with no backup connection in case of the emergency. Believe me, during these years we witnessed some popular hosting companies with very flashy site designs being offline more than 20% of the time and simply not providing what is considered a must have these days - even the most basic backup connection to our servers. What's even worse is that some of them didn't even notify us about the sites being offline and we suffered a lot from those situations.

Another important thing is which carriers your hosting is using. It's a networking thing - and some carriers simply have slower connections to some parts of US and World. It's a good practice to test your future hosting from those parts of the world that you plan to target. You can do it simply by using Ping command from your command prompt and write down response times. That's how you will be able to compare them to each other and figure out which one has the best connection.

There's also one thing that shocked us when we got a hosting plan from a well known US hosting company. We know that outsourcing is very popular these days but outsourcing of servers? I mean, you can imagine how surprised we were when we realized that our newly purchased server which was ready for use was physically located in Turkey! I mean - how far can the arrogance of these companies go? I want to provide the information to general US public and that's the reason why I have chosen the US hosting company. But the next thing you know is that all my data has to travel from other side of the world to someone sitting in Detroit... Why? Well I guess that was the reasonable explanation why this company's servers were much much cheaper than the same servers offered by their competition. This is a simple case where you learn that it's not only the price that counts. In case of choosing the future website hosting services provider it certainly isn't.