Hosting Company and Domain Name
It is extremely important to choose the right hosting company for your website. This is the company that will be putting your website out there for the entire world to see. If you don't have a reliable hosting company, there will be problems in the future.
Start by making a list of all of the domain names you could ever want. Think about different spellings and variations. Think if you want a dot com or maybe a dot net or dot biz. When the list is written down, it will be easier to find one that is available when you find that perfect hosting company. Usually a hosting company will give an available domain name for either free or minimal cost. Now you can focus on finding the best hosting company to meet your needs.
Don't go start by finding the cheapest hosting company around. We used to use a really cheap hosting company called Name2Host and it was a struggle every day to keep our websites up and running. Not only was it is a constant fight, the company would continually try to blame us for their problems. Finally giving up, we moved all of our sites to HostMonster
and have not had a problem since.
Price is definitely a factor, and that is understandable, but there are other things to be considered as well. Let's look at the questions to ask a hosting company before you giving them any hard earned money.
- First of all, can the company support php scripts? Don't worry if you don't know what this is, we will go over it more later on.
- Does the company have 24/7 phone support?
- When you call this phone support, where are you calling to?
- Is the system on backup power in case of a power outage at the server site?
- How is the company connect to the internet? Are they on a T1 line (which is like super-broadband) or are they on dial-up?
- How much traffic can you have to your site?
- If that traffic goes over the limit, what is the cost?
- How much storage space do you get?
- Can you purchase more if you need it later on?
- How many E-Mail accounts do you get associated with the domain? This is important because it will allow you to have an e-mail address associated directly to your site (example: you@yoursitename.com) rather than using some generic webmail account.
- How are payments made?
- Are payments made monthly, yearly, or every other year?
- And what are the terms of the account? Do you have to pay two years in advance or five years in advance etc.?
These important questions will help to choose the right hosting company for your website. With the hundreds of hosting companies out there, we have done some of the research already. The links below are some of the companies we recommend. These companies consistently rank in the top twenty (20) hosting companies with terrific technical support. Clicking on any of the logos below will open up a new window to that particular website.
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1&1 Web Hosting |
AN Hosting |
Blue Host |
Dot 5 Hosting |
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FastDomain |
Go Daddy |
Host Monster |
Hostgator |
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Hostpapa |
IX Web Hosting |
Lunarpages |
iPowerWeb Inc. |
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Yahoo Web Hosting |
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