Starting up a new website has many pitfalls, and while it won’t always be possible to avoid every slip up, by looking at the options and checking what you need, getting the right web hosting service shouldn’t be one of them. There are many different options available for web hosting, suitable for everything from a small personal website through to large commercial offerings, and the right service will depend on your circumstances. By looking at what you are expecting to achieve from your website and how much traffic you expect, this should help you to choose the right hosting service.
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Data Transfer Limits
This is one of the most important factors for any website, and can particularly affect those who are using the least expensive forms of web hosting. If your website becomes very popular quite quickly, it can reach a data transfer limit imposed by the web hosting service. If it does so, in most cases the web hosting service will take down the website until you either pay for a larger data transfer limit or move the website to another host. By monitoring your usage and traffic statistics, you should be able to ensure that this doesn’t happen.
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Downtime
One of the most important statistics when choosing your web hosting service is to see what their downtime figures are. For a business or e-commerce website it is important to be available to your customer as often as possible, so the lower the downtime the better. Even the biggest websites will go down for maintenance from time to time, so look for figures above ninety nine per cent or higher in terms of server availability.
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Free Hosting
Many internet service providers will offer a certain amount of free web space along with their internet access packages, and for smaller websites this can be all you need in some cases. While it may not be enough for large company websites, it will usually be plenty for a small start-up just looking to get a foothold, and you can then move the website elsewhere as the site grows.
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Email Capability
The majority of companies that register domain names will actually want to use an email system that makes use of that domain name, so it is worth making sure that your web hosting service has this facility. It is rare for it not to be offered to some extent, but the smaller web hosting packages may limit your website to a small number of web addresses.
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Services Offered By The Web Hosting Service
It is worth going through the different packages that are on offer from the web hosting service, as many will include other facilities such as website building tools or e-commerce facilities as a part of their package. Using a web hosting package in this way can often be cheaper than getting each individual part of the package separately.
By being smart and ensuring the web hosting service has everything you need, along with a little headroom for the growth of the site, you can ensure that you don’t have any problems as your website begins to develop and grow.