Why do you need a good web host?
Without a good web host, you have no site. Without a site, you earn
no affiliate program income. Without affiliate program income...
well, you get the idea. This article will discuss some of the points
that you should consider when looking for a good web host.
Free or Paid?
For a first (or practice) site, or for a personal site, free hosting
can be a good solution. You will almost certainly have to put up with some
ads on your site, you cannot expect too much in the way of support, and there
will usually be major restrictions on using scripts, on bandwidth, on
actual page content, and on disk space. Having said that, many free hosts
have good online support, or forums, where you will find other users
willing to help. You may also find that the servers tend to be slow at
times which will affect users of your site.
A couple of free hosts are:
www.geocities.com
www.earthlink.com
For business sites, free hosting is really
not an option. This is partly because of the ads that will appear on your
site, over which you have little control. It is also partly because
you will have a ridiculously long domain name to deal with, such as
www.thefreehost.com/usersites/yoursite/. Mainly it is not a good
idea to use a free host for a business, because it projects a poor image
of the business. If a business cannot afford the small amount of
money it costs for paid hosting, often less than $150 per year, it is
difficult to expect potential customers to take them seriously.
How much Disk Space and Bandwidth?
How much disk space you need will depend both on how large you expect
your site to be. Also, what do you plan to feature on your site?
If the nature of the site is a Flash site, or one making extensive use of
video, audio, or large graphics, you will need more space than one that is
mainly text based.
AffiliateAdvice.us recommends that you keep
your site as text-based as possible, because that will help you to become
more easily listed in the search engines, but that's up to you.
For most newer sites, disk space and
bandwidth needs are usually modest. Statistically ,the average website is
less than 20MB. Being swayed to a more expensive hosting plan
because of a large disk space allocation may not be a great idea if you
are paying for a ridiculous amount of space you will never use. Make sure
that there is a means of upgrading your plan should your needs change in
the future.
Unless your site is likely to be extremely
busy from the outset, or you are making heavy use of Flash, video, or
audio, you are unlikely to need more than the standard bandwidth which
will be provided with standard hosting plan. In general, as the disk space
allocated increases, so does the bandwidth.
Individual Requirements
All sites have slightly different requirements and thus there is no 'one
plan fits all' solution. Make a list of featured that are most important
to you and use this when comparing hosts.
For example, you may need the latest version
of Perl, PHP Support, a large number of POP accounts, access to a secure
server, MySQL, etc. Or maybe you don't know what any of that stuff
is, and really, you just want to be able to build some pages, upload them,
and make sure that when you have problems, someone can help you out, so
perhaps a toll free support number matters more. It is important to get
your requirements clear so that when you compare hosts you are comparing
oranges with oranges, rather than oranges with lemons...
Oh and speaking of...watch out for the
lemons. There are a few web hosts around still who are not great,
and a few bad new ones pop up from time to time. They aren't good because
they don't deliver on what they promise you at the outset.
Any of the hosting programs that you can
resell through the
Web design affiliate
programs page on
affiliateadvice are great, and
our general advice is to use a web host that is recommended to you by
someone you know and/or trust.
For example, if you've been pleased with
your experience so far on affiliateadvice.us, and think you could benefit
from high quality service as well as a very inexpensive (less than
$8/month) web host, you might consider using our web host,
Powweb.
The bottom line is that
there are a variety of web hosts out there, and a variety of them offer
different kinds of services. If you don't know what your needs are,
or do know today,
but don't know what your needs may be in the future, it's a good idea to
have a package which either gives you everything you need from the outset,
for not a lot of money, or have a host that gives you the ability to upgrade when you need
to.
This article was reprinted
from
affiliateadvice.us, where you can
find
great affiliate programs and ways to generate online
income.
To your affiliate/internet success
Headmaster/Principal
Affiliate Programs College
