Whether you’re looking to change web hosts or you’re starting a site for the first time, you need to find the right host for your requirements. To find out what you need to look for — and what to look out for — take a look at these tips that will help you find a great web hosting provider.
When transferring your site between hosts, have a copy of your website at both your old and new hosts for a few days. It’s important to do this because it takes 6-48 hours for the DNS to propagate. During this time, some visitors will be sent to your old website, while others whose ISPs have updated their DNS info will be sent to your new site.
Keep track of how many often outages occur and how long they last. If they are too long and too frequent, you should think about choosing a different service. Most services encounter issues once in a while but if they are not fixed quickly, you are not getting your money’s worth.
You should keep a backup of your site on your computer or on a flashdrive. In case your web host is encountering major issues and you cannot have access to your data, you will be able to switch to another host by simply uploading your site to a different server.
Choose a hosting service that allows you to instantly and easily view your web statistics. You will want to know things such as how many people are visiting your website and what pages they are viewing. You can even find out how long they stayed on your site, and what search words they used to find you. These can be important in the long run, so use a server who has these tools.
To prepare yourself for the experience of using a free web host, get used to the idea that you will have a lot of downtime. Staying up all the time takes some specialized equipment that free hosts don’t really have the budget for. As a result, your site may be down more than it is up.
When reviewing potential web hosts, look for one that can give you detailed analytics about your site’s traffic. Get a visitor counter on your site, and compare this number to the statistics given to you by your web host. You can benefit greatly from this information as a business owner, because it allows you to adjust your approach and tweak your site to maximize traffic.
If you want an affordable and efficient host and do not mind running a blog, subscribe to WordPress. This host has a very efficient plug in that converts PHP pages to HTML and caches them: this means visitors still have access to the cached version of your site in case the server encounters an error.
Finding a solid web hosting provider is of paramount importance for anyone with a website. Don’t disappoint your visitors with the downtime that comes from having an unreliable host. These great ideas will help you sort through the wide variety of web hosts and make a decision that you will be happy with.
