WEB HOSTING 55

You do a lot of research for different service providers to get your site hosted. Most of the web hosting companies promise you huge disk space, high connection speed, and different control panel options – all at a reasonable price. However, out of the various web hosting companies, you need to identify the genuine service provider that enjoys good reputation.

Some of the points that can help you identify a genuine web hosting provider are discussed as below.

•    You can gauge whether or not a web hosting company is professional or unprofessional by noticing the kind of general and technical support it provides. Are the people answering your phone calls? Are they replying to your mails? If the answer is no, it means that either they lack technical staff to do the job, or they are not professional enough. You should stay away from such web hosting companies.

•    Get an idea of their business by looking at their prices. If they are offering hosting service at a price that is too low, just pause, and think – why? They may be cutting down certain features, or they might be making false promises. Verify their reputation in market by doing some research, and ask them for free demos. You will get an idea of the validity of their claims.

•    Have a look at how their prices had varied in the past. If the prices have changed too frequently, it reflects that they are not good in their business, or perhaps they are not able to retain their customers.

All these factors can help you distinguish between a good web host and a bad web host. Do proper research for the web host that you approach rather than putting your business at a risk.

Web Hosting – Domain Registration

It seems a strange question as to why do you need invoice for your site hosting. In fact, having regular invoice for even the smallest transactions with the host has many benefits, as discussed below.

• Very few people know that designing and launching a website involves tax planning as well. It depends on the purpose of your site; however, you can include the expenses incurred on designing and hosting a site as a medium for tax deduction.

• You are required to provide relevant documents and invoices, including a copy of contract signed with your host to prove that you have spent some money on your site. Discuss the transactions with your tax planner and show that this money is a part of your tax planning schemes.

• Apart from helping in tax planning, there are other benefits of having an invoice from your web hosing service provider. Many companies generate auto-bills for their clients on monthly basis. You are required to ensure that the required amount is always available in your account for monthly deduction. In the event of non-payment even for one month, you will be shocked to see that your site has gone offline.

• If your host promises to mail the invoice to you, ensure that you receive it regularly well on time if and when it is due. Since sending you an invoice is not a priority task for your hosting service provider, you should take responsibility to save print copies of all invoices.

• You can use your invoice if you notice any discrepancy in credit card payments that you made to hosting company. An invoice is handy as you can keep a constant watch on the payment. If you have an invoice, you can challenge your host’s claims of irregular payment.

• In addition, your invoice should also include any extra payment that you make for additional bandwidth, or charges paid for updating site if it is a part of contract. It is a better option than to notice after three months that your credit card has been overcharged for the services that you actually used.

Web Hosting – Domain Registration

The evolution of web hosting resellers began when the web hosting companies with large investments in servers and infrastructure started recruiting third-party companies as a type of commissioned sales force to help them get return on their investment as soon as possible.

Such third party companies were given incentives to “resell” web hosting services with advanced technical support, private labeling and volume discounts. This helped in making the primary web host completely transparent to the reseller’s customers. Basically, more the number of customers that a hosting reseller can deliver to the web host, greater will be the discount earned by the reseller and more will be the money they can make.

In fact, a large number of today’s primary web hosting companies actually began as web hosting resellers and later bought their own servers and added staff by expanding and reinvesting their profits.

You will come across thousands of resellers who operate under their own brand names but prefer that their web hosting customers do not come to know that they are actually reselling another company’s hosting services. Does that affect your online business?

The answer is Yes and No.

Sometimes, resellers may be able to offer more attention and personalized service to their customers because they don’t have as many customers to deal with as a full-fledged web hosting company. Moreover, they can offer value-added benefits to their customers by including other services in their web hosting packages, like:

• Search engine optimization
• Database management
• Web design
• New applications

Unlike other intermediaries, the resellers may offer hosting packages at the same or even lower price than originally provided by the web hosting company. This will also depend on the volume discount they receive and the margin they need.

However, you must also understand that all web hosting resellers may not be trustworthy and reliable, even if their primary source or web hosting company is an established, reputable entity. If a reseller is unable to pay or chooses not to pay their hosting bills, they can be shutdown by the primary web hosting company without any warning to the customers like you. Since your hosting contract is with the reseller, you may not even get any recourse to the primary web hosting company.

As resellers don’t have any investment in equipment and infrastructure, it is very easy for them to get out of business at any time. They can come up with another name and get associated with another brand, leaving you stranded with a worthless web hosting package.
If you want to avoid such a situation, it will be a good idea to ask the reseller about their company, experience and the primary web hosting company. A reputable reseller will be honest and offer value to its customers through their web hosting packages. If the reseller doesn’t want you to know that they are not the original host, you will find it difficult to confirm about their operations. You could ask to visit their data center and enquire about their services from past customers and in hosting forums.

In short, you need to be inquisitive and investigate about the reseller thoroughly before choosing to host your website with them. Whether it is a reseller or not, your primary concern should be to get quality service for your website and reliable support at all times.

Web Hosting – Domain Registration

Before you select a web host service provider, you should look at all the aspects of the services on offer. It is essential that you precisely know your web hosting requirements. This will enable you to check whether or not a web host provider is equipped enough to cater to your requirements.

Here is a checklist of points you must consider while zeroing in on a web hosting service provider.

• First of all, you need to validate your web host service provider’s credentials. Check via referrals and feedback as to how your web host has served the different clients. Reliability is such a significant aspect that you need to have a look at while choosing a web host. Do not fall prey to those phony, enticing offers without checking the reliability of the offer and credibility of the web host making that offer. Paying a little more price would be worth it if the web host is trustworthy.
• Up time reliability is so crucial to your online venture. Your customers, clients, affiliates, or associates want your website to be accessible all the time. Therefore, do not choose a web host that does not guarantee around 99 percent uptime. Besides, you need to acquaint yourself with the hardware and connections the web host uses. This will help you gauge the downtime frequency.
• Check whether or not a web host service provider charges any set up fee. In fact, a lot of good web hosting companies charge some set-up fee to cover the costs involved in providing you with high-end technical support.
• Do not opt for web host service providers that claim to offer “unlimited bandwidth,” because it is all crap. Unlimited bandwidth is virtually non-existent.
• You should opt for a web hosting service provider that offers a space of at least 1 GB. This will help you have some buffer space. Moreover, if you plan to expand the space in future, you will have to pay extra price. This price can be really high compared to what you pay when you get more space straightaway.
• Look for features like multiple domain names, mail forwarding accounts, mailing lists, java applets, database access, password protection, and back-ups.

Web Hosting – Domain Registration

The best judge of the right time to switch to a new web hosting provider for your website is you. There are many factors which have an impact on this decision. Some of the most important ones include online business expansion, customer demand for more facilities and problems faced with current web host.

Most people experience web hosting issues like slow uploading of pages, file transfer errors, unfulfilled uptime guarantee, bad technical support and bandwidth and disk space restrictions. If you are one of these people, you must consider shifting to an upgraded web hosting plan or change the web hosting company itself.

A website’s performance is affected by the efficiency of the web hosting service. For critical websites, even a few hours of downtime can result in huge business losses. In the virtual world, customers will not waste any time at an inaccessible website before they shift to a competitor. That’s the last thing you want for your online business!
The decision to switch to a new web host should not be taken impulsively. You need to analyze the best possible solution for your website’s issues rather than making a wrong move in frustration.

Here are a few indicators for alerting you about the right time to shift to a new web hosting company.

#1: Tech Support
If you aren’t getting prompt response for your queries, the technical staff is either overburdened or incompetent. Both situations are harmful for your business if your problems remain unsolved for a longer period of time. Before your online business starts facing losses, you should look for another web hosting provider to reduce the downtime involved in shifting from one host to another. Test the technical and customer support of the new host before signing the service agreement.

#2: Package Pricing
Don’t get lured by free or cheap web hosting plans. Go for a reasonably priced web hosting package which offers large amount of features. Reputable web hosting companies offer feature-packed hosting plans for all levels of businesses. You must check their credibility, experience, security and customer reviews to get a better idea about their services.

#3: Flexibility
Many website owners feel the need to shift to an upgraded plan or another web hosting company due to restrictions on business growth. When your brand popularity rises and customer traffic increases, there will be need for more applications, scripts, files and other features to be transferred in and out of your website. this requires flexibility in bandwidth and data transfer limits. Shared web hosting may not be able to support high traffic websites. Then, it will be better to go for dedicated or colocated web hosting.

Whether you decide to switch a web hosting provider or not, make sure that your website has the required support at all times. If not, then its time to go to a new web host which can surpass the services provided by the previous one.

Web Hosting – Domain Registration