What to look out for in webhosting companies? Six main criteria of choosing the right webhosting company.
1. How much disk space is available?
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. Typical 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 today's 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 offered 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 bottom-line 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.