Web Hosting Servers

Once you have selected your niche and registered a domain, it’s time to choose a Web Hosting service for your new website or blog, i.e a place where you can store and modify your website’s content and make it accessible online.

There are many good offers on the market including some free web hosting services, but you should make some serious considerations before making a choice.

You will find below some important points that require attention.

  • CPanel Web Hosting
  • The availability of CPanel will greatly simplify the administration of your websites or blogs.

CPanel is short for Control Panel web hosting. This is a kind of hosting service which is very popular among re-sellers, end-users and web administrators and helps you to manage your domain through a web browser. The life of a webmaster or web administrator is made simpler and less complicated with this software. The matter of handling and management of numerous accounts can be easily accomplished using only one window. If there is a need which involves having to go to the many inboxes, all one has to do is to open one window and view them all.

One of the CPanel options is called Fantastico which allows the simplified installations of software such as WordPress blogs. You don’t have to worry about creating a MySQL database and other details; you just enter some information, press a button and your Blog is installed automatically.

Some Cpanel features are

  • Website Statistics: AWStats, Webalizer, Raw Log Manager, Referrer and Error Logs
  • Fantastico: Instant Shopping Carts, Blogs, Portals, Forums, Counters, Formmail
  • Password Protected Directories and Custom Error Pages
  • Web Based File Manager, Hotlink Protection, IP Deny Manager, Redirect URL

Web Hosting Plans

Most companies offer a variety of Web Hosting plans with different costs and conditions. Some points to consider in order to make a good choice are the following:

  • Number of allowed domains. Basic plans often allow a single domain to be hosted and this could be a serious limitation if you plan to host more than one website or blog
  • Possibility to use subdomains, i.e domains linked to a main domain that do not require registration. They can be useful to expand your website in separate areas.
  • Disk space availability
  • Bandwidth availability

Other points to consider are the following:

A basic plan might allow multiple domains, but all of them will have the same IP address which might be shared also with other users. This could be dangerous because any problem encountered by one site might reflect negatively on all other site (e.g. a spam complaint). You could start with a basic plan and then migrate to more flexible options once your business (websites, blogs, traffic) expands. You could step up from shared hosting to services like a virtual server or a dedicated server.

Web Hosting Reliability and Support, It is important to choose a reliable service with very limited downtime.

The support is very important if you have problems with your websites or blogs and you should check how you can contact the support service and if the guarantee a time for the response. I personally use Hostgator for most of my websites and I have experienced a very high level of support from this company. They have answered my queries in relatively short times and help me to solve complex problems. Before making your choice, I would advice you to visit some forums and check what people think about the support of the hosting company that you are considering.

Web Hosting Location

Your location always counts when you need to pick a web hosting provider for your website. It might be better to choose a company based in your country because it should simplify the support. However if most of your visitors are expected to come from other areas such as the U.S., it might be better to choose servers located where most of your visitors exist.