When it comes to choosing website hosting solutions, most of us already think we know what we need. We need a reliable, customer-friendly company that will host our sites and deliver our leads, email, and clicks to us. But, if you stop to think about it, you actually need more than a company acting as your connection to the Internet. The server is just the beginning of what most companies actually have to offer you.
Yes, you need server space, and you probably want a lot of it. You also want a lot of bandwidth so that you can service a lot of customers at the same time, and so your pages load quickly. But, don’t you want to be able to set up a database? If your website hosting solutions company is not MySQL or PHP-friendly, then your choices are very limited as to what you can implement on your website.
Also, you might want to think about your domain name. If you have just one domain and one email address, then just about any website hosting solutions firm will do, but if you have more than one domain, you have a few questions to ask. Can you host multiple top-level domains in one account or will you have to pay more per domain? Some companies will actually require you to set up multiple accounts, which not only cost you money, but a lot of time, too.
Most importantly, however, should be the question of customer service. With any website business, you need to have someone on the server side on whom you can rely 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. If they have “office hours”, then you will be in big trouble when your site goes down and your customers start calling you. Pay a little more and choose a company with reliable service and you won’t be disappointed.
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