Many people all over the world are making their own websites. Naturally, when it comes to getting hosting, newcomers just aren’t sure where to go. But not to worry, there's plenty of places to find hosting online. But it's easy to fall for a nice advertisement and a cheap price, only to find your money would have been better off spent elsewhere. There are some things to help you in avoiding falling into the wrong hands.
(1). Technical Support - This should be first on your list whenever you go looking for good hosting. Regardless of how many other features they offer, if there's no-one there to help when you get stuck, then it's not worth having. You can throw their name into Google and find out about the company by reading reviews. While none of them are perfect, you still need one you can rely on. If the reviews are good, you have a better chance than if they're not. Here's a tip: Call the hosting company before signing up. Call the number that takes you through their automated system, and then gauge them accordingly. Did they answer quickly? Were they polite and helpful?
(2). Advertising - When you look for something cheap and you find free, that probably means that advertisements will figure in. Many times if you get free hosting, then the companies you get it from will post their advertisements on your site in order to pay for it. Serious businesses will not have someone else running ads on their site.
(3). Reliability - Lots of hosting sites will claim they have 99.9% reliability. You may ask yourself what that means. It means that within a 12 month period, your site should only be down for approximately 9 hours, which is .001 %. All of the hosting companies out there strive to hit the 100% mark, but 99.9% is about as good as it'll get. No company in their right mind is going to guarantee to stay up 100%.
(4). Space Amount - Do you get limited or unlimited space? And if it's unlimited, is is true? Sometimes what you read as 'unlimited' actually refers to a specific amount of space. Usually it means around 30-50GB's of data that MUST be related to your website. What this means is that you can't use it to back up things like you iTunes library and things like that. You really don't need as much space as you think anyway. I am running five sites that total less than 300mb altogether.
(5). Bandwidth and Traffic - Is this really unlimited as well? No way. What bandwidth is, is the amount of data that gets transferred to and from your website. This is basic and simple. What the hosting providers are worried about, is not the bandwidth itself, but in the amount of strain the traffic puts on the server. If you get a surge in traffic, and everybody else is on the same server, it may cause some problems. If you traffic causes problems for others on the server, your site may be shut down temporarily. And this isn't because of bandwidth, but because of server strain. If you have this type of problem, you may need to look for a larger hosting plan or a dedicated server.
(6). File Size Limits - How big is one file? A file size limit is the size of any individual file. File size limits may vary depending on how the file gets uploaded. If you're using FTP, then there's not usually a limit. But if you use another type of software that they give you for building your site, it may be limited to around 10-15MB. You may never have a problem like this, but it's good to be aware of it.
These six tips should help you get on your way. But this is just the beginning. There's a lot more to learn once you get out there, like domain names, email, shopping carts, and many more. Keep this in mind, if you go with a hosting plan, be sure it has a full 30-day money-back guarantee in case anything should go wrong.