Posted by Craig Cochrane on 18 September 2011 | 0 Comments

Part 2: Website Hosting Facts

Now that you have your domain name registered, it’s time to think about how and who you want to host your website. For this you will need to look for a website hosting service that meets your requirements.

A website hosting service stores your website on a special computer called a server, which is online 24/7 so that internet users can access it at any time.

Costs and services can varysignificantly so you need to look at what you are really getting for your money. A good way to work out what is right for your business is to weigh up what is important to you and what you can live without.

Most people have their website designer or web manager handle their hosting. Although it is possible to handle your web hosting independently through sites like Free Parking, when it comes to sorting problems it’s generally better to have it all under one roof. In saying that, you should ask the following about the web hosting service provided.

Location: Many hosting platforms used by website companies are off-shore. This is not a bad thing necessarily, especially if you have a dot com address or are targeting customers from all over the world. However, if your business is aimed solely at a local market, then it is a good idea to host in the country where your target market is.

If you have a New Zealand and an Australian arm, then it makes sense to host a separate landing page with an Australian web hosting service, rather than just having one or the other.

A good web service provider will have more than one option available for web hosting.

Security: What sort of anti-virus and spam protection is in place at the hosting stage? Too little and you will be spending half your morning deleting spam – too much and you may be filtering out important messages. A good website management service will spend some time tweaking your settings when you first sign up in order to get it right.

Up Time and Recovery:Up time equates to the availability of your website online. Ideally this should be all the time, but because we live in an imperfect world, the best you can expect from a Web Hosting Service is making sure your site is up 99.9% of the time. Most will have a Service Level Agreement to provide this, but what you need to ask is whether this is being monitored and what sort of back-up system is in place. If your site is down frequently or for more than 24 hours, then you run the risk of Google removing you from its rating system. If this happens then you will need to request reinstatement from Google a process that can take a week or longer.

Need to ask more about Website Hosting?

List of previous blog topics in this series:

Next topic:

1. How to get a Domain Name for your website

3. Types of Websites

This month’s topic:

2. Website Hosting facts