What will happen if you create a website that highlights your handcrafted items and you decide to sell them? You have to place a shopping cart onto your website. Select hosting services provide this; however, not all of them do. What other features may you need to take into account?
Web Hosting Service
Look at numerous companies before choosing your web hosting service. If you rely on the recommendation of only one or two people, your chances for making a mistake are much greater. Perhaps those people have limited experience with websites and hosting or they have some kind of affiliation with the web hosting service they are recommending.
Seek web hosts that do not have outages on a constant basis. Web hosts that experience down time and make excuses for outages do not ring reliable and do not have a back up plan. Frequent downtime demonstrates a poor business model, so it’s best you do not commit to this company.
If you like your web host but dislike certain aspects of your service, research alternate services as a back-up. By doing this, if you end up with issues that aren’t solvable, you have a place to turn quickly without having interruptions in your service.
Register your domain name outside of your web host so that in the event of a shutdown or fight between you and your host, you can keep your domain name and jsut transfer it to a new server. You will have no control over your domain registration but your host will.
Once you have selecting your web hosting company, you should opt to make payments on a monthly basis, as opposed to committing to a longer period of time. Consider monthly payments – what if you need to cancel service sometime down the road? If your host goes out of business or if your company outgrows them, you could lose any hosting payments you’ve made.
Considering using one of the many free website hosting services out there for your site? If you decide to do this, back up all of your data. Most free web hosts don’t provide backups of customer data. If one of your files vanishes, there’s nothing to be done. If this happened with all of your site content, it would be impossible to recreate without a backup.
Choose a host that will allow your growth. While HTML doesn’t take up many kilobytes, videos and photographs can. Make sure that you have access to at least 100 MB of storage, which should allow you plenty of room to grow and develop your website.
The amount of traffic you receive on your site can affect your hosting charges. See how they’ll bill you, since many have various flat rates and categories.
Be wary of web hosting packages claiming unlimited services. For instance, an offer of unlimited disk space may limit the types of files you can store. Unlimited bandwidth claims may simply mean a tiered rate structure. Read the fine print and see what “unlimited” actually means. It may be less than what the company wants you to believe.
If you want to save some money, try out a free host. Using a free web host means that there will be advertising on your site. Also, you won’t have as much space for your site’s storage. If you require lots of space or a professional look, this type of hosting probably isn’t best for your site.
When in doubt, simply review the tips above to see if the hosting provider you are looking at offers the right features that make sense for your business website or website for other purposes. Know what you want to avoid over or under paying for hosting features.