Shared Hosting Selection Tips - By: Christine Anderssen

If cost is an issue when you are looking at hosting options then shared hosting is the best value for money option far exceeding the so-called benefits of 'free hosting'

Some shared hosting providers provide excellent service. It is in a shared hosting provider's best interest to make sure that all the sites being hosted on a server get equal amounts of bandwidth and that none of the sites implement practices or techniques that are harmful to the other sites hosting on the same server. These include things such as running scripts that consume too many resources, sending out too many emails in one specific time period, or even getting too much traffic. A good shared hosting provider will monitor the servers for such eventualities and quickly suspend or disable the offending account.

If you are therefore thinking of engaging in such practices - think again, since you will just get your site shut down in no time.

How do you know which shared hosting company to go for? It is actually easy enough - the ones that have been in operation for a while all know the ropes. Just make use of a good web hosting review site and search for reviews of shared hosting providers.

These are useful indicators of customer satisfaction.

Things to watch out for when selecting a web hosting provider are some of the following points:

- Do you require 24x7 support? You might if you are sitting in a different time zone from your hosting provider and YOUR business hours are not their business hours! You might need to immediately resolve technical problems during your business hours that might actually fall outside of normal business hours for your hosting provider.

- Try and ascertain what the size is of their data center. If you can't glean this from their website or from a web hosting review website, ask them directly. Avoid companies that have only one or two servers. If anything goes wrong, they won't have a fallback server to provide a quick turnaround.

- Look at the features and benefits provided by the hosting company. Your hosting company should at least provide a control panel, as well as simple access to website statistics, as well as provision for email setups, managing sub-domains and installing scripts.

- Sometimes a hosting company offers various freebies and special deals to sweeten the deal. Hosting is very competitive and this is a way to get more customers. The benefit is yours since you might get free coupons for pay per click marketing, or free access to web templates for 3 months - keep your eyes open for these offers and if they are made by a reputable hosting company - go for them!

When looking for shared hosting it is always a good idea to check out the contract fine print. You need to make sure, especially if this is particularly cheap hosting, that there are no hidden costs in the fine print. Examples of these might include things such as extra bandwidth or hard disk costs, additional costs for 'extra' features such as extra email boxes, or having to pay extra for things such as server side scripting or MySQL databases.

Shared hosting is always a slightly risky undertaking since you can never be 100% sure of the stability of the company. You therefore don't want to be tied into a hosting contract that expects you to pay for a couple of months up front - you might just end up losing that money. Another reason to only enter into a short term contract is that the hosting provider might not offer you the level of service that you were looking for. In this case you also don't want to be tied into a long term contract.

To safeguard yourself against any eventualities, make sure that you have a fallback plan in case your web host goes bankrupt. This should include making your own backups of your website, as well as registering your domain with a third party registrar instead of through the hosting provider so that you retain control over your domain name.

About the Author

Christine Anderssen is the owner of Tailormade4you Web Hosting and Web Design. Download your free guide to a having a successful website from http://www.internet-web-hosting.co.za with essential but simple tips on making your website a success.

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