subject: Web Hosting Safety Tips; Do Not Ignore These! [print this page] You need a great web hosting company in order to run a great online business. Do not cut corners and make mistakes in this area. You have too many other things to worry about, without having your web host to worry about. And changing your hosting service is not only inconvenient but disruptive. These are my top safety tips in finding and working with your web host provider.
1) Do not give your web host control over your domain name. Your domain name is your entire business identity. You send all your traffic to it; without it you are in trouble. I use namecheap.com for all my domain names, and a totally separate web host.
2) Watch out for free web hosting offers. There is just too much at stake with your web hosting. If one day your service stops working, who do you complain to that is really concerned about losing your business?
3) Customer support is crucial! You are not only paying for web site hosting, but for customer and technical support from experts. They are the ones who will save you hours of research time. Time you can spend on so many other things.
4) Do you know who your provider is? Many resellers sell hosting services from another hosting provider. And the reseller probably has little to no control over what goes on. Make sure you have control over your account.
5) How much are you willing to spend? You find great deals with hosting packages under $5 and month. Keep looking until you find these businesses.
6) Some hosting services put a limit on the amount of data you can store. Don't be satisfied with hosting companies that limit your storage. The probability is that you either now, or in the future will store multi-media data. These take up a lot of space, especially if you are accustomed to text or image files. Your best host offers unlimited storage.
7) Bandwidth is the amount of data going in and out of your account. If you display video, and have file transfers going on, make sure you have enough bandwidth. There are hosts with unlimited bandwidth.
8) Always ask for cPanel, - because you want a blog-based web site. cPanel provides you with a utility called fantastico where you can create a blog from scratch in only a few keystrokes. If you choose to use the standard web site languages and creation tools, this cPanel is not as important.
