Website Hosting Companies. Understanding How Hosting Poviders Work
By: John E Adams
Website Hosting - How To Select A Web Host Provider That Wants You To Succeed
As with a lot of purchases, your first urge when choosing website hosting is to go with the cheapest. After all they are all similar, so why should you pay more?
There are a number of objective standards which separates one website hosting company from some others, and money is only one of them. And it should be made clear that the cost should not be the most crucial one.
Choosing a website hosting company based on price alone is equivalent to selecting a builder or electrician on price alone. Certainly, they might maintain or fix your house cheaper, but will your house be safe?
The first consideration is power. Will the website hosting company have the capability to provide and deliver adequate performance? Most web hosting companies advertise that they are able to provide massive bandwidth and hundreds of dedicated servers, and they are usually telling the truth.
However, there is a big difference between existing capacity and usable capacity. Think of it this way; If a website hosting provider has thousands of websites with millions of visitors per day, the usable free capacity would be much lower. Here is a simple example; A delivery truck may have the capacity to carry 8,000 lbs. But not if it is already carrying 7,999lbs!
The experts would advise you ask about available capacity, and have the hosting company back up their proof with reliable numbers. And of course, if you cannot read the data they provide, find somebody to help you do so.
Next, and a very close second, is dependability. A lot of power is worthless if it is cut or goes down often.
Power outages are actually a normal part of business. Even Microsoft, yahoo and google go down on occasions. The difference is, with decent website hosting companies, it seldom happens and a decent provider would have failover plans, which means if their system does go down it is either up once again instantaneously, or you never see the drop because a backup system sets in automatically.
A good rule of thumb is to grill the website hosting company closely about their up time. Most quality hosting providers will say they run at 99.5%, or higher. However, like the infamous on-time estimates of airlines, those figures can sometimes be considered shady by adjusting the definition of up time.
Article Source:
http://www.articlecity.com/articles/computers_and_internet/article_4075.shtml
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