What is Web Hosting?
Web hosting is the service of holding your websites files on a server, the web host will generally own a large number of servers.
What is important when considering a web host?
There are number of factors that are important when considering a web host, these include:
- Guaranteed uptime
- This just means the amount of time the host guarantees you that your website will be reachable, many offer as high as 99.9%, which says that the site will be offline no more than one hour roughly every 42 days, not bad 'eh?
- Support
- If you're new to the internet support offered is especially important, but this is also important incase you do experience a problem, some hosts offer 24/7 support which you will rarely need, but is a great thing to have if you ever do run into trouble!
- Bandwidth allowance
- Bandwidth is simply the amount of information transfered from the server to people viewing your website, as well as information sent from people viewing the website to the server! While it is important that you have more bandwidth avaliable than you'll need paying for more than you need can be wasteful! Also something to look out for is hosts which offer huge amounts of bandwidth (thousands of gigabytes sometimes!)
- Storage space offered
- The amount of space offered by hosts can varey hugely, from a few megabytes, to hundereds of gigabytes. But again, as with bandwidth, you must take these figures with a pinch of salt. A company offering hundereds of gigabytes of storage for £10 a month will most likely be unable to really give you that storage, so only consider too little storage as a problem, and not too much as an advantage.
- Database access
- Many websites these days, especially larger ones or those featuring a product catalouge are run by storing much of the information in a database. If you think these sort of features could be useful in the future database support is important, beware, some hosting companies charge extra for use of a database, in our opinion this is an unfair business practice as giving a user access to a database doesn't increase the host's costs in most cases.
So, based on the above factors you should have a better idea of what makes a good web host. If you would be interested in any of our services don't hesitate to contact us and we'll be happy to help!
