There are many factors to consider when choosing a web-hosting company:
- Long Running, Reliable, And Typically Larger Companies With Great Customer Service - You probably don't want to trust your eBiz to a small Mom n' Pop that just set-up shop last month. The larger, more popular companies usually have the most enhanced features and have streamlined the set-up process to make it as easy as possible.
- Location Of Physical Headquarters Is Not Important - Since everything you'll be doing is over the internet, it doesn't matter if the web-hosting company is down the street or across the country. However, they better have an 800 number for customer service questions. All large web-host companies do.
- E-commerce Capabilities - Even if you do not plan to take transactions over the internet or have a shopping cart now, you may later come up with a new idea that requires these services. Always pick a company that you can grow with.
- Disk Space - This is the total amount of computer file space that your web site takes up. The overwhelming majority of small eBiz sites use less than 10MB (megabytes). In fact, most use about 1 to 3MB. To play it safe, make sure that your prospective web hosting company allows for 10MB of disk space without additional charges.
- Data Transfer Allowance - This is the amount of files that are viewed in a month. For example, if each of your web pages is 20KB (about average), and your typical visitor views three of your web site's pages, then you can have almost 17,000 visitors per 1000MB or 1GB(gigabyte) of transfer allowance. Because most small eBiz sites receive much less than 10,000 visitors per month, you probably won't need more than 500MB (1/2 of a GB) per month of data transfer. The most popular web host company in the world,Verio, offers their two most affordable packages with either 1GB(1000MB) or 3GB of data allowance per month. This is more than enough for probably 98%+ of all web sites. If you anticipate higher tens or even hundreds of thousands of visitors per month, you may want to use a web host such as Virtualis which allows 30GB of data transfer per month. Almost all web host companies will allow data transfer overages, but at an additional cost. Just like cell phones, you should pick the appropriate traffic package up front instead of facing the incremental overage fees which makes it much more expensive.
- E-mail - All web hosts will allow you to receive e-mail through your domain name but some offer only a certain amount of e-mail aliases while other may offer unlimited ones. Do you just want to receive mail at one or two addresses such as webmaster@yourcompany.com or do you want to have numerous e-mail names like sales@, president@, advertising@, ScottB@, etc. Depending on your needs, you may want to go with a certain web host company or a certain hosting package.
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