Rob

Picking the wrong website hosting company can cause a plethora of problems for your online and offline business.  Downtimes they don’t tell you about and not being able to run certain applications you need, are just a few examples.  Moving your website from hosting company to hosting company costs precious hours that could be spent on more profitable endeavors. 

So pick well and stay put.

Here are a few pointers from a guy who’s suffered the consequences not once, but multiple times before finally achieving a reliable, successful host.

  1. All hosting companies boast “99% uptime” and it’s just not true.  Your site will go down.  The real questions are:  why and how fast will it get back up.

At blog4bucks, we host Blog-Sites and put “flags” on all our sites to be notified when they go down.  If you don’t have an uptime monitor you should.  Check out Siteuptime.com to set up a monitor on a single domain for free.

  1. “Unlimited bandwidth” claims are gimmicky come-ons to get you to buy a cheap host.  You get put on an over-taxed server causing slow load speeds and more downtimes.  Don’t fall for it. 

You get what you pay for in hosting as in all other things.  You’ll just end up moving all your site files a month or two down the road anyway…so don’t bother.

  1. You will need customer support.  How well they handle customers is often the overlooked (but most important) aspect of your new host. 

I think live support via chat is the best way…rather than email or a ticket system.  Of course, the ideal host has all three, like us at blog4bucks.net.

  1. Slow servers are my next pet peeve.  It doesn’t really matter if your host gets all the above “big three” done right if your site visitors have to wait 12 seconds for your page to appear in their browser! 

With the advent of blogging or other CMS platforms to build websites, 2 servers must be fast (the web server and the database server) to get quick load times.  There is nothing worse than moving all your website files to a host and finding out your website actually thwarts visitors since it takes forever to load your pages. 

Our sizeable Blogsite, themortgageinsider.net, using a blog platform as CMS and MySql database loads on our hosting server in .336 seconds…a third of a second!  Now that’s fast!

So with those few (but important) hosting tips in mind, you can now shop for a hosting company.

Good Luck

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Filed under: Website Hosting

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