Web Hosting is a vital part of having a website for your company or business, however choosing the proper web hosting company can be a difficult thing to do, especially if you are not very familiar with them. However it doesn’t have to be, as long as you know what to look for you can make your web host shopping experience easy.
There are several key elements one should look for when purchasing a monthly shared hosting company. We are putting together this guide to educate you prior to you making your purchasing decision. This guide will lay out all the major things you should look for when purchasing your web host, and helps you to identify key points that differentiate providers.
Hard Drive (HDD) Space
The Hard Drive Space is important because it tells you how much space you have to work with on your server. Files and images take up space on your hard drive and it works the exact same way on a web server. So you need to take into consideration how big of a website or application you are going to be creating, so you know about how much space is going to be needed.
Another thing to remember about space is, if you want to add on other sites to this server later you will need that additional space.
Monthly Bandwidth Allowance
The monthly bandwidth is basically your traffic allowance or how much data can be transferred on a monthly basis. If you are going to be hosting a large site with a lot of users you need to ensure your web host will be able to support the amount of data that is going to be transferred. If you plan on creating a video or image sharing site you need to understand that the bandwidth that goes with these sites is very large.
Multiple Databases
Since most of the web applications today are considered to be “Dynamic” you will need to have a database in order to store the data. So if you are going to create multiple applications or multiple website on one shared hosting account you need to ensure you have enough databases to support it.
Add-On Domains
Many shared hosting providers allow you to have what are considered “Add-On” domains, which is essentially adding another website to your current server. Make sure you look at this option when choosing your selection because some companies may not allow this, and it can be really important if you want to add on sites later.
Shared or Dedicated IP Address
Make sure you find out if your IP address is going to be shared with other members or if your hosting account will be on a dedicated server. Depending upon the type of website and application you are looking to create, this can be really important, as you have to have a dedicated IP address in order to get a Security Certification for a SSL site.
Hopefully this guide has helped you understand the many different aspects of shared hosting servers and what they offer. Like with any purchase make sure you do your research on the company in hand as well and don’t just go by these specific stats we have addressed.
Mark is a seo consultant who has several years of experience in the SEO industry. He has extensive knowledge on how Hosting can affect SEO of a website and how website loading speed has become one of the crucial factor in ranking. He recently read Hostgator review where the user specifically mentioned how he got better rankings due to fast loading site after switching to host gator.