Web Hosting Advice and Tips - ForgedNetwork.com

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Below are some must read advice and tips about web hosting services.

Buying the right web hosting solution is a very important decision. Whether your website is for an online business, an information resource, a discussion forum, or for sharing views on a hobby or interest; you must use a web hosting service that will allow everyone else to view your creation. It is web hosting that empowers you to share information, sell products and services, and interact with people through a web site. Trying to choose a web host can be a very confusing exercise, especially when you consider the growing number of web hosts and their confusing advertisements. Therefore, it is important that before jumping in, you go through some sort of a research process for selecting the most appropriate web hosting company for your Internet presence.

Please follow this checklist to help yourself in your research.

1. Test the host's support.

DO NOT join a host without testing out their support first. The best way's to test out a host's support is calling in or emailing or submitting a ticket to support. You'll be surprised how many hosts with an 800 number never answer their phones, or have long hold times. Or take a while to respond to your support ticket or email.

2. Never pay yearly

DO NOT PAY YEARLY one thing you will notice is that most of these incredible scam plans force you to pay for a year up front to get the good pricing. Why would a hosting company care if you pay monthly or yearly? After all if you are happy with them you're going to end up staying much longer than a year. So why? It's because most have horrible support, slow servers, or even tons of downtime. If you were paying month to month you're not going to stick around, but if you paid for a year up front what are you going to do? You won't get your money back so you have no choice but to stay with them. ONLY PAY MONTHLY! Sometimes we offer a special if you pay yearly and this is available for you as an option only.

3. About hosting directories and the truth about customer testimonials

DO NOT ever believe anything you read on the hosting directories. They don't care who they recommend as they are all paid listings. The highest bidder gets the spot. What you should do to find reviews is search Google using the company's name. If they have been around a year you should find many real reviews of people who use their hosting. Another good place to check would be the company's forum, but don't always believe what you see. Our testimonials are located here. We do not have a lot right now but we have only been posting testimonials for only a short time now.

4. The truth about disk space and bandwidth

You should have figured out how much data your website will generate, and also the amount of bandwidth you will need. The disk space is the amount of storage assigned to the account by the web hosting provider. Bandwidth is the amount of traffic that the provider allows to be transferred to and from the website. Websites that include a lot of graphics would require more hard drive storage than a predominantly text based site. The same would be the case when dealing with bandwidth. If your website is dynamic or uses databases, make sure to check if the web host has separate limitations on the size of databases. Also check how much your web host charges for extra hard drive space and bandwidth. If you envision that your site will continually grow, then allow some headroom in terms of storage and bandwidth. Remember, there is no such thing as unlimited or unmetered bandwidth! Internet bandwidth and storage space are finite commodities, they are not available in infinite amounts and are capped at some point of based on hardware or service levels. Don't be fooled by the 'unlimited' or 'unmetered' web host, there is no such thing.

5. Look beyond the price

As the saying goes, "you get what you pay for". This certainly holds true in the realm of web hosting services. If you focus too much on the price, you are likely to end up with a sub-par web host that will provide you with a combination of overloaded servers, poor connections to the Internet backbones, frequent downtime or little or no support.

6. Support, guaranteed uptime, and backups

Always choose a reliable web hosting provider with a good service level agreement (SLA) and support options. Ways that web hosts provide support includes online trouble-ticket/helpdesk systems, web discussion forums, live chats, phone support, with technicians and email support. With respect to uptime, this guarantee is usually a little harder to find and enforce. If you settle for 99% uptime, that means your website could be down for an average of 14.4 minutes a day. That is actually quite a lot, especially considering the amount of potential revenue you might be losing. On the other hand 99.99% uptime makes a huge difference and leads to a average negligible down-time per day. Some web hosts will also provide refunds if they do not meet their SLAs and others may include extra security features like automated backups and load balancing. So if you need reliable web hosting, make sure to check the support, uptime and backups provided by any prospective hosting company.