Website Basics-Choosing a Hosting Plan
 by: Richard James


Once your website has been created, it is time to make it go live on the internet. In order to do so, you will need a hosting plan. A hosting plan is different from a domain name. You own your domain name but you rent a hosting plan. A hosting plan in it’s simplest terms is paying a company to broadcast your website onto the internet. This article covers what to look for in a hosting plan.

SERVICE The number one thing to look for in a hosting plan is service. It does not matter that a multitude of features are offered or if the price is low if the service you will be getting with your hosting plan is sub par or even worse, nonexistent. Once your website is live on the internet you will want it to be up all the time. Therefore should a problem occur it is important to select a hosting provider that is readily available and will resolve the issue in as timely a manner as possible.

UPTIME What is the hosting company's "uptime guarantee". Many guarantee 99% uptime for their servers. That sounds great, but it does mean that your site could go down for 1% of the time, which means over 7 hours out of each month! If you can, choose a host guaranteeing 99.9 uptime.

SIZE How large is your site? Most sites do not require much space but if you're planning on having a large site with a lot of multimedia content or an ecommerce site selling multiple items, you'll probably need additional disk space.

DESIGN How was your Web site designed? For example, if you designed a website using ASP or ASP.NET, you'll need to find a Windows hosting plan. If you have a Web site that uses CGI or PHP, you'll need to get a Linux hosting plan. For the novice user who is building a simple website the above may not be a consideration at first, but may become important later on as you become more experienced and add more features to your website.

TRAFFIC How much traffic or how many visitors do you expect monthly? The more visitors or traffic you expect on your site, the higher the bandwidth you will need.

At www.startmywebsitetoday.com we offer 99.7% guaranteed uptime and service 24/7, and a variety of shared hosting, virtual dedicated hosting, and dedicated hosting plans with either Linux or Windows operating systems for every need and budget ranging from the small personal website to large online multimedia sites to those interested in ecommerce website building. Check us out HERE.


About The Author
StartMyWebsiteToday.COM was created by Richard James to provide information and website building tools tailored to all levels of expertise from beginner to expert and for all budgets from shoestring to unlimited. More articles on related subjects can be found by visiting: http://www.startmywebsitetoday.com This article is copyrighted, please do not alter in any way.