Your Own Website
When you launch your own website, there are a myriad of things to consider. You’ll want the right look and function for the site so you can attract and retain visitors. You’ll also need to make sure the foundation for your site is functional and appropriate. This is one of the less-than-glamorous aspects of website building, but you need to get the basis for the site right the first time so you won’t have to backtrack and redo certain things to get the most out of your experience. One of the things you want to get right straight out of the gate is choosing a service for web hosting.
What is Web Hosting?
If you’re just delving into the world of website owning, you might be a little confused about all the terms you’re running into. So, what exactly is web hosting? It’s basically a place where the files on your website stay. If web hosting is the home where your created content stays, then you can think of your domain name as the address where you can find all of this information.
Choosing a Service
There are a ton of web hosting services out there, so you’ll need to do some digging to figure out which one is right for you. You’ll need to decide on a price point you’re comfortable with. You can find a decent service that won’t charge you more than $80 or so every other year. Also, you should consider bandwidth limits. Are you going to be serving a few people who are looking at your site for, say, calendar listings periodically? Or will you be attempting to rank on Google and serve a national or even international crowd? If the latter scenario is the case, make sure the service you contract with is prepared to serve your bandwidth needs.
Answered Questions
Finally, when looking for web hosting that’s right for you, you need to figure out how much support you’ll need and if your chosen service is prepared to answer your questions in a timely way. If you’ve never set up a website before, it helps to use a service that has representatives available 24/7 to answer your questions online. You may be required to submit a help ticket in these instances and wait for the first available rep, but it usually doesn’t take long for a company that’s committed to holding your hand through the process of establishing your website to get back with you.