by Lucas Heijn

Choosing the right web host is a little like choosing the right shop for your business. In saying this I don’t mean location but size and facilities. We will discuss location in another article.

If you’re are planning to start a business or have a business going and plan to move to new premises you would spend some time in looking at what is available, and what is suitable. You need to do the same in choosing a web host. There are certain things you need to make sure you have.

How much disk space do you need on the server?

How much space (disk space) do you need? Here it is wise to get whatever you can afford. Most websites will run on just a few MB. You need to find out if you can upgrade without difficulty. If you plan to run a membership site with lots of downloads, you will need more than 500MB. You will find that there are plenty of web hosting providers that offer up to 1GB or more for very reasonable rates.

What is Meant By Bandwidth?

You will also require a reasonable bandwidth. What is bandwidth? With your current internet provider you are allowed a certain amount of download. This is basically what bandwidth is. Each time you get a visitor to your site they view your site page or pages depending on how many they view. Each time a page is downloaded or viewed by your visitor they are using bandwidth.Hosting companies will limit the amount of bandwidth you use. If you exceed this your site could be temporarily suspended and is no longer visible to your customers. This helps you to see that bandwidth is very important. You need to make sure that you will have enough. If more is needed later it can easily be negotiated with your host.

Will You Require A Database?

The short answer is yes. In fact you will need to make sure that you can run a number of databases. There are many web applications that require a database to run. Let’s say you want to have a Blog on your site. You could download the free script from WordPress. To install it you need a database. There are so many applications that require databases that you should consider at least getting 5 or 6 available as a minimum.

Control Panel. Which Is Best?

There are a number of different ones used by hosting companies. There are two that stand out for ease of use. You need to be able to easily understand how to use them. The two I like best are Direct Admin and cPanel. Both are excellent. Many webmasters swear by cPanel. I personally like Direct Admin better, I feel it is the easiest to use. The control panel is where you work behind your site. Here you can set up email accounts, new databases and much much more.

Other Things You Need To Look For

There are added extras that you should be expecting from your hosting provider. a vital one is a site creator. Does the hosting account come with a simple to use site builder? One of the easiest to use in the business is the Drag And Drop site creator. This is a very powerful creator being able to generate vibrant PHP sites.

Some will even provide you with products you can set up on your new site. All you need to do is modify a few details in a HTML editor and your site is set up to go. In the mean time you can be busy creating your own unique site.

Location is everything. At the start of this article I mentioned location. Your web host is not responsible here. Location is completely up to you. You create the location by SEO (Search Engine Optimization). There are many things you can and need to do to increase the traffic to your site. This is another subject we will deal with at a later date.

About the Author:
Lucas Heijn is CEO of LinksParadise a hosting company. LinksParadise specialize in hosting for internet marketers. They supply a package that has been expressly designed with business people in mind. They have a number of hosting packages to meet your requirements. www.my-web-host.com

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