Web Hosting Tips For Newbies

Here are some tips based on my own experience that hopefully can be helpful for newbies in search of a 'home' for their first website.

The first step is compiling a list of web hosting providers.

• Make a search for 'web hosting' on main search engines.
  
  
• Check related categories on general and specialized directories.
  
  
• Another good place to check out is the Web Hosting Offers section at WebHostingTalk forums.
  
  

Be sure to bookmark every site.

Then start visiting all the sites you've found and search for the informations you need to answer the following essential questions.

For how much time the web hosting company has been in business?

Almost everyone can rent some server space and start offering web hosting services with a relatively low expense.

But this doesn't mean that this business can be run without the necessary experience. It's a very competitive field and many newly created companies quickly fail.

If you care about your website you must be sure you are dealing with a professional organization that has already passed the test of time.

My personal advice is that inexperienced users should not deal with hosting companies that have been in business for less than 2 years.

If the company website doesn't contain any information about when they started their operations, you can post a question in a support forum if it's available or simply call and ask them.

How can you be sure they told you the truth? The first thing you can do is checking when they've registered their domain name.

• Go to http://www.internic.net/whois.html
  
  
• Enter the company's domain name and click Submit
  
  
• Look at the value of the field 'Creation Date'
  
  

Again, WebHostingTalk is a great resource for this kind of research.

How can you contact your host if you have questions or problems

At least a contact phone number must be provided on the website.

Many companies choose to not provide technical support by phone. This is acceptable as technical issues can be effectively solved via email.

In any case you should always be able to speak with a company representative by phone at least for general inquiries and sales questions.

Do they offer a sufficient number of different hosting plans?

One of the problems you encounter when you create a website (especially if it's your first website) is that is quite difficult to know in advance all the resources and features you will need.

Almost every company offers several different hosting plans: be sure that you can always switch from the entry level to the most advanced ones easily and without additional costs.

If you are charged a one-time fee to set up your site, check if the same fee is applied again in case you decide to upgrade your hosting plan.

Do they offer an uptime guarantee on their hosting products?

It's probably an obvious statement, but the worst thing that can happen to your website is being inaccessible because of a network or server problem.

Any reputable web hosting company should offer an uptime guarantee. A 99.9% uptime guarantee is almost an industry standard and it should be computed on a monthly basis.

This means that on a given month the cumulative downtime cannot exceed about 43 minutes or you will be compensated, usually with a discount on the next month hosting fees.

Are the very basic features you need for your website offered?

If you are about to create your first website you will be probably very concerned that some important feature you're not aware of is missing from the hosting plan you're considering to purchase.

This a common concern, but usually it's a false problem. Your first website will necessarily be very simple and all the features and add-ons you need to run it will be present even in entry-level web hosting plans.

However here is a quick list of the very basic feature the web hosting plan for your first website must have.

• At least 1 gigabyte of disk space. This amount allows enough space for several hundreds of static pages.
  
  
• 2-3 gigabytes of monthly transfer. This amount would be sufficient for a new site even if the majority of the hosting companies usually offer a lot more bandwidth.
  
  
• POP access email (at least 1 account). This allows you to use Outlook or another email program to read emails sent to your site.
  
  
• Website statistics. You need to know where your visitors come from.

You will usually also get a set of pre-installed scripts to manage forms or other add-ons like forums, message boards, blogs.

If your site contains mainly static pages and doesn't offer big files to download, it will have ample space to grow without exceeding the resources provided by this very basic set of features.

A quick note about free hosting

Free web hosting is usually not a good choice for a business website. You will sooner or later discover that a feature you need is not available and that you must upgrade to have it enabled. Beside that, in many cases free web hosting providers automatically add advertisements (banners, pop-ups or text links) to every page of your site.

However if you want to create a personal website, test a preliminary version of your site or get your feet wet with HTML or a scripting language like PHP, you can consider this possibility.

In this case you can check out our list of free PHP enabled hosting services.

Switching from a hosting provider to another always creates some problems. I hope these simple tips will help you to make the right choice from the beginning.