The Web Hosting Decision: How To Choose A Web Host

If you are launching a new website, one critical decision is where to have the site hosted. A web host is the location of where your web site actually resides on the internet. It may help to think about this in relationship to a human family. They have many options where they may live, and there is just a single place that is there home at any given time.

Websites are the same way. Websites live on web servers, which are computers attached the internet and which store web pages for people to view. The computer which stores a website is called a “web host”.

One major decision is whether to use a free web host or use a paid service.

Using of the free services sounds like a good idea, because not only is the price right, many of them feature easy-to-use web creation tools. Though there are good reasons to use them, you should not do so for your primary sites. Besides showing ads, some of the services are known for deleting your sites for no apparent reason, and there is always the risk of the service shutting down. In either case, you lose the hard work put into building the site.

When you set up your paid web host, you have a few options. You can either purchase it yourself or in the event have engaged the services of a web designer, these professionals will often make web space available to you. Some of the criteria in selecting a web host include:

Price: what is it going to cost you to host the site, not only in base service fees but also for any additional services you may require?

Reliability: does the company have a history of problems with keeping sites up? Try and look beyond the actual out of pocket cost of hosting and gauge what it will cost if your site goes down for any period of time.

Cpanel: you should not consider any web host that does not offer cpanel for configuration.