Web Hosting
Web hosting is extremely important. Many internet service providers offer you a free website with their residential plans, but this webspace is not meant to be used for business websites. If you do want to use your free ISP webspace to host your business website, we offer free domain name forwarding with all domain name registrations.
Why do I need web hosting in a datacentre?
The internet is arranged like a road system, there are connections that offer a large amount of traffic and connections that offer small amounts of traffic. When a user, reads your website, they are actually requesting a file, and they are using up bandwidth. Webservers are high powered computers that are connected to the internet on connections that allow large amounts of traffic. Sometimes to cut costs, web hosting companies will overload the servers with too many websites or use an inferior connection to the internet. This means that your website will suffer the consequences of slowing down as the number of people accessing the server that your website is located on increases and your website is more likely to be down, because of server failure. Computers crash when they are overloaded. Almost everyone has seen the consequences of clicking on too many programs at one time and seeing the program crash and the computer restart. In the same way, servers that are overloaded with too many websites or busy websites find that they are more vulnerable to hardware and software crashes.
Large companies who use a website to run applications like internet banking will have their own servers or multiple servers because of the number of clients visiting their website and the volume of data each visitor uses.
However, most small to medium sized businesses, host their website on a shared server. This means that many business websites are being hosted on the one server. Shared hosting is a cost effective way of hosting the websites of most small to medium sized businesses. Computers cannot serve an unlimited number of users and therefore each server must be carefully balanced to ensure that it is not overloaded. If a million visitors were to hit your website simultaneously, the server would not cope with the demand.
How to research web hosting companies?
In the beginning, forums and review boards were great ways of finding out whether a hosting company was any good or not. Typing in the name of the company and the word review, will generally get you a few pages of reviews. However, with competition there is deception and it is important to verify the source of the article, opinion or review. If it sounds like it was written with copywriting marketing hype, then its probably the company's representatives doing some easy and deceptive marketing.
Another way is type the name of the company into the search engine and words like 'down'. 'downtime', 'poor','mistake' or 'problems'. Usually this will separate the sheep from the goats and if the company has had bad reviews, they will appear on the first few pages of your search results.
Avoiding the companies with bad reviews is one way of researching a hosting company.
See Testimonials
Assess Your Needs
Every hosting company has different pricing and plans and it is best to decide exactly what you require.