The 10 commandments of a professional web hosting company

You will certainly know the problem if you ever wanted to bring your new and professionally designed web pages online: Which hosting company should you choose? After all, there are hundreds or even thousands of them. What are the key aspects you, as an Internet marketer, have to watch out for?

01. Service/Support

It is very important that you always have someone to talk to if you have made a deal with a hosting company. If your web site is down for several hours it might cost you hundreds or for some of us even thousands of dollars in sales. Fast action is necessary then, so it’s vital to your business that you can reach them 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Another thing to watch out for is professional assistance for installing and uploading scripts or complete web sites if you’re not familiar with it.

02. Reliability

The uptime of a server should be at least 99%. The best thing is if the company can provide mirror servers which will be accessible if the hardware server has to be maintained or the like. Look out for testimonials or awards on their site. If they don’t have them, ask if they can provide you with some email addresses of satisfied customers which you can ask about it or about reviews of their service.

03. Cost Effectiveness

It would not make sense to choose a hosting company that offers all important features but costs you a small fortune each month. No hosting with the here mentioned basics should cost you more than $20 per month. Anything above that would be a waste of your dollars. This is meant for home based businesses, though. Professional high budget companies might have to meet different criteria.

04. Modern Hardware

You need to make sure that the hosting company uses the best, fastest and most reliable servers you can get for your money. If the speed of the servers can not keep up with the demand of web pages for your domain, your web site will slow down and might take ages to load. Again, look out for testimonials.

05. Easy to use CPanels

There are several different administrations panels available for your web hosting but certainly one of the best is the Cpanel. It offers all the great features under one roof and especially their Fantastico script collection where you can install most scripts by adding a few details and clicking your mouse button.

06. Enough POP-email Accounts

It is important that you have some mechanism in place to sort out your emails automatically into different folders. If you have enough email addresses to use, you can file them into these folders by sorting them according to the receiver email address. e.g. all article submissions for your ezine go into folder from the email address articles@domain.com .

You want to make sure that your email addresses reflect your domain name if you’re an online marketer. POP-email account means that you can use any email client to automatically receive your incoming emails. You don’t need to login on a web site and check your emails there. This can be a very tedious and time consuming task. A Hotmail or Zwallet account is not advisable for any professional business emails!

07. Free CGIs

There are a lot of cgi programs available which will enhance the functions of your web site. These options include using scripts for automatic capturing of email addresses with little pop-up boxes like Opt-in Lightning. Then you must upload that script to your /cgi-bin directory to make it work. Just uploading to your web space will not do the job. Other possibilities for these scripts are tracking features for your ads so you can directly see how successful your advertising campaigns have been.

08. Enough Web Space Included

In the beginning, you will be tempted to go with the lowest amount of web space included because you might be on a tight budget. After all, those web pages just have a size of just a few kb , so most will not even reach 100 kb per web page. But you have to think in the future, too. Do you want to offer a lot of free downloads like software demos, free ebooks and similar items? Then you must be prepared that it will take a lot of your space.

Also, if you update your web site frequently (which should be a matter of course), you will need much of that space. I have experienced this at first hand with my own web site. I started with just 10 MB web space and after 4 months it was too small already. If you have reached your web space limit, you are not able to upload any new content and files to your web site and you might have to wait a week or so before you have upgraded your web space…! This could mean a delay in your marketing activities and you don’t want to risk that.

09. Enough Bandwidth Included

Most of us will start small if we bring a new web site online, so the need for bandwidth will not be urgent at that time. But what if your company grows and with it the traffic that comes to your web site? Will you have to pay additional fees because you just have 1 GB transfer volume included? I’ve seen several sites already which were switched off by their hosting company because they used too much bandwidth.

But you want to have large amounts of traffic, do you ? So make sure that you don’t have to pay for this additional traffic or you wil not be able to relish your prospering business… In most cases, 10 GB bandwidth will be enough even for high traffic sites. If you’re offering a lot of downloads, you might need more than that, though.

10. Extensive statistics

This is one of the most important features a web hosting company should offer. You will have to analyze where your traffic comes from and how successful certain advertising campaigns are. You can even set redirect pages which can be viewed in your statistics so you don’t have to use a tracking service. You must be able to view the referrers, your daily unique visitors and which pages have been accessed.

If you also can see which keywords at the search engines have lead your visitors to your site, it can be worth its’ weight in gold. You will be constantly working with this information for improving traffic and performance of your web site, so you should take this point very seriously. A last tip from me: Make sure that the company you’re working with is at least two years in business already. You don’t want to consign your web site to an unreliable company which will be going bancrupt because they could not handle their business correctly…

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==> The hosting company which fulfills all of these requirements and the one I’m mentioning if I’m asked about which hosting provider I recommend, the answer is Hostmonster.com. They offer 300 GB of web space and 3000! GB of bandwidth. Moreover, you can host unlimited domains with them.