Web Hosting

At some point you’ll need to purchase web hosting. Web hosting is still a bargain and we keep getting more for our dollar. You need to not under buy or over buy.

If you are going to put a lot of video and audio on your website you will begin to pull “bandwidth”. Bandwidth results in extra charges from web hosting which has a very low monthly rate. Be sure to find this out before signing up.

Business sites are often online brochures with static pages, which have very low band width requirements. Still the lowest price web hosting is not the best deal. Somewhere in the $15.00 and up range is a better place to be. You don’t want your website to packed into such a dense server (the physical computer of the web hosting service) that your site is slow in responding to visitors’ requests. You can read my guidelines on my website:
http://www.brendasimon.com/custom_web_design_pricing.html

The company’s reliability is a huge issue. Are they actively maintaining their servers? Are they investing in newer servers? In this economy: will they be there tomorrow? I am currently keeping my clients on a month to month billing cycle. In the past we purchased hosting annually to get a bit of a break financially. All web hosting has down time – there is time when the servers are maintained and upgraded performed. MOST companies schedule this during off peak hours. Recently one of my client’s hosting made changes on a Friday morning which disrupted a client’s email for 6 hours, and they received no advance notice.

Talk to the web hosting you are considering, check out their tech support. Only email tech support is tough to deal with as a web designer and webmaster. It might work for you. Know the rules going in.
For those who like to read more: http://whreviews.com/