Modern Websites

1. Guaranteed uptime and reliability of service

If your business has a problem with its website being down due to hosting problems, It is not only that you are likely to be loosing sales and money, you may also be loosing money as your clients may judge your competency (unfairly) based on the fact that your website is down. (Similar to clients arriving when you have lost the keys to your shop)

As reliability is of utmost importance, most website hosts have their site information duplicated and shared among many servers so if one has a problem the ability to serve your website data without interruption is not affected.

Find out if your potential host will guarantee 99%, 99.99% or even higher reliability. If they cannot guarantee any sort of reliability, don’t use them.

2. Availability of 24/7 Support and type of support

If you run a business you need to find out how quickly and easily you can contact the website hosting support team, and how rapidly they will respond and solve your problem. ·

• Is support by phone where you can to speak to a live person, and how expensive is it
• Is support via chat session or
• Do you need to submit a report ticket on a form.
• What hours are the support section open?. (especially important if they are not based in the same country as you since you time zones may differ).
• Do they provide cover 24 hours a day, every day?
• How long does it take to get a response or resolve your issues?

3. Email Services

A good website host will provide you with comprehensive mail management facilities similar to yahoo/msn but basic in nature i.e. ability to send, receive mail, delete mail, designate senders as spam, forward mail to another mail facility such as another email address or MS Outlook, or create a Mailbox so you can send out mail in your company name. You should be able to create a large number of separate email addresses and manage them individually.

4. Site Administration / Site Management Tools

Website hosting companies other a wide variety of tools for managing websites. These tend to be placed in an Administrator Control Panel. The easier they are to understand, the more you are likely to use them.

Most of the time the sheer variety of tools is used as a selling point by website hosting companies. These tools can be used to view visitor statistics or billing, send alerts, or even provide tools for including extra facilities or tools in your website such as graphic images, newsletters, a Google map, blogs, forums, slideshows, video etc.

5. Supplementary or Sub Domains / Partitioning

Most website hosts will allow you to purchase and keep domains until they are required without having to purchase hosting for them at the same time.

Some website hosts allow you to partition your website hosting space so you can place different domains on different sections and reduce the cost of your hosting so you only pay for a single hosting package. This is extremely useful if you have several websites, however, if you ever have a problem with your hosting, you will temporarily lose access to ALL your websites. So you may choose to avoid doing this.

Many hosts will allow you to create sub-domains of your original domain for free. You can uses these sub domains for dedicated sections of your site e.g. an e-commerce sub-domain or blog separate from but linked to your main site.

6. Storage Space

This is the amount of space provided by your host for the package you sign up to. Generally more expensive packages come with more webspace. Since this is usually quite large (in the Gigabyte range) you are unlikely to exceed it unless your site is huge e.g. you host videos on your site or you have opted for free hosting which may have very limited webspace e.g. 20-100mb

7. Bandwidth

Anytime web traffic (visitors) view a page from your site or watch a video of flash animation on your site, they actually download that information to their browser. All the pages, images, animations (flash) or videos on your site contribute to the overall size of your webpages. In the past this was not a problem as you were highly unlikely to exceed this unless you had hundreds of thousands of visitors.

The advent and spread of on site video is changing this. If you exceed the bandwidth allocation granted to your by your host, you may be charged so you should look into getting hosting that is targeted specifically at providing for streamng video downloads if you intend to showcase video on your site. These webhosts also provide tools such as ffmpeg to help compress video and speed up their streaming play.

8. Provision of File Transfer facilities (FTP Access)

9. Database and Database Management Facilities

10. Transfer Facilities

How easy it is to modify your package or transfer your domain

11. Traffic and Statistical analysis features

Can you easily track and analyze your visitor traffic?

12. Advanced or special requirements