A good hosting solution should be a backbone of your website
Posted by imark | Under Search Engine Marketing Wednesday Aug 20, 2008Are you one of those who sweat it out for your website’s layout, content and marketing but take it easy when it comes to selecting a hosting service for your online venture?
If your answer is a Yes or a near Yes, I would suggest that keep hosting service selection as an important task in your scheme of things.
While there are more than one reason for making a well researched choice before selecting a service provider, none is more important than the fact that its not often that you switch hosts and even if you do, it can be a cumbersome process.
What kind of services you should be looking for depends upon your website and your requirements, but few selection criteria are almost universal, like:
- i) Uptime - This is generally expressed in % and signifies the quality of service in terms of being available or down for maintenance/upgrades. If you are serious about your online presence and have a good traffic, then anything less than 99% is a strict no. Its like customers coming to a store and finding it closed often. It will turn off the visitor and he or she may move on permanently from your website. Moreover Google search bots also don’t like a site to be down when they come to crawl your page.
- ii) Features- There are some standard features which you would want to have like a cpanel which allows you to easily manage your hosting account. Also, look out for sub-domains, email accounts and scripts which assist you in installing wordpress or other open source package.
- iii) Page load speed - Your pages should load quickly. You don’t want your visitors to feel frustrated waiting for things to load. A service provider with a good server which can handle loads at peak time will not let you down on this.
- iv) Customer Service- Check out for the hosting company’s turnaround time when it comes to addressing customer queries and providing technical support. A word of mouth testimonial from people who have tried the service can be beneficial in making a decision.
There are many more factors but these form the crux. So in nut shell go with only the best web hosting with cpanel, which can handle load at peak time and provides a quality customer service.
I agree that uptime is so important, I had a host one time that had my wesbite down for more than two days. I was mad and lost money because of it.
What do you think a good uptime number is?
Hi Debbie
As users, we would want uptime to be as close to 100% as possible but practically anything above 99.5% is considered good. Again this comfort level depends upon the kind of application.
hi Abhishek, probably it will take sometime for you blog to go higher in PR rankings. In the mean while, why don’t you start link building.