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. A business website must buy commercial webhosting.
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.
The commercial reality is that most websites are hosted in companies that are driven for profit, not service and the drive for competitive pricing comes at the cost of support and service. Good hosting is like finding a needle in the haystack and if you are serious about finding a good website host, then do your research.
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'. 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.
Contact Web Hosting Company
Next, when you have your shortlist of candidates, contact these web hosting companies. If they don't respond in a day, then its not a very good sign.
Ask hard questions about true uptime, maintenance, outages, average time to respond to customer service requests, etc. Look and see if you get a well written and intelligent response.
Trial the Web Hosting Company
Unless there is some compelling reason, don't commit to more than month by month contract until you are satisfied with the service. Contracts can get messy, especially with some of the big name web hosting companies. You may be liable for the entire term of the contract, and find yourself stuck with a poor web hosting service.
Web hosting Pricing and Plans
Our Content Management System, CMS is hosted on Microsoft Windows 2003 server. It utilizes MS SQL databases and ASP.net. We host with the leading provider of ASP.net and customers do not have to familize themselves with ftp, HTML or any computer programming language. We make it simple, and take care of the technical aspects of website design and web hosting.
Passion Computing ensure that your website is hosted on quality equipment and properly managed. This means that your website should be online 99.9% of the time. Specialized Microsoft Certified Technicians monitor Dell PowerEdge Servers, providing reliable uptime and support.
Websites are hosted in a state of the art, secure data centre and monitored 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, redundant power, dual cycle air conditioning, security, video surveillance, raised floors to protect from flood, daily backups for disaster recovery, and more
Website Management details the prices and plans available and Managed Virtual Dedicated Hosting is somewhere in between shared hosting and dedicated hosting, ideal for larger and busier websites.