ARTICLES FOR WEBMASTERS 
 Three Key Considerations for Choosing a Web Hosting Service
There are many factors specific to your business that you must consider
in choosing a web hosting service. For example, will you need a
shopping cart, or multiple email addresses, or hosting for multiple
domains? Take the specific needs of your business into account when
fine-tuning your choice of a web hosting service. But be sure that
whatever hosting service you choose satisfies the three most important
criteria.
Reliability
What could be worse than going to the time, effort and expense of
getting your business online and directing traffic to it, only to find
that the hosting service is frequently down. Customers coming to your
site eager to do business are greeted with an error message instead of
your landing page. Not exactly good for business! Look for a guaranteed
uptime of greater than 99%.
Disk Space and Bandwidth
Disk space is the amount of data storage the hosting service will allow
you, and bandwidth is the amount of data your site will be allowed to
transfer to clients. How much of each will you need? There’s probably
no way to know early on, but you should plan on needing increasing
amounts of each as your website grows. As a rough rule of thumb,
probably 3 GB of bandwidth, and 10 MB of disk space will be sufficient
for most new websites.
When you’re comparing services, check the minimums they provide for
disk space and bandwidth, but also check to see what they charge if you
go over the minimums. Read the fine print of the service agreement;
some services are much more reasonable than others about exceeding your
allotments.
Support
When problems arise, as they inevitably will, you want to be sure that
your web hosting service will be available at all times to resolve the
problems. After all, one of the great advantages of doing business on
the web is the round-the-clock accessibility you can offer your
customers. If there’s a problem at 3:00 a.m. on a Saturday, you don’t
want to have to wait until Monday morning to get it fixed. Look for web
hosting services that offer technical support 24/7.
What About the Price?
Use the price of the services you're comparing as your LAST criteria.
As the saying goes, you get what you pay for, and when you’re shopping
for a web hosting service, your priority should be to get the services
and support you need. Anything cheaper will turn out to be very
expensive in the long run.
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