If your website isn’t very large or complicated, each of its pages probably contains less than 1 MB of data. In computing terms, that’s small, which makes your hosting needs pretty basic. Because most small businesses don’t need a lot of space or high-end performance, web-hosting companies sell shared-hosting plans, under which your website is housed on the same server as others. But there are drawbacks.
If you share a server with other sites that use a large amount of resources — a high-traffic e-commerce or video-sharing site, for example, the performance of your site may suffer due to sharing the same server resources. Shared hosting can cost less per month than a cup of coffee, but as your business grows, you may find your site’s load times slowing down or laden with unexplained error messages. As you grow larger, you might run out of bandwidth as your monthly traffic increases. When that happens, you may want to upgrade.
If a web host doesn’t have an online demo of its control panel, ask to see one. Some features, such as setting up custom email addresses, are easy to handle on your own when the control panel is easy to navigate. Also look at the online support documents; the bigger hosts may even have how-to videos to help you. You can learn some basic maintenance tasks and avoid having to pay an IT contractor an hourly wage to do them.
If you haven’t made up your mind for a host and are just reading, but are still looking around, try the hosting firm that we have used. I cannot say that I haven’t called the support team for any issues, but anyone with a website ends up doing that, at some time. Mine have always been minor issues, such as email not working (a server not responding), or I will have to update my information with them.
So give it a try.
