Choose a Professional Web Hosting Service

Choosing the right Web hosting service is very important, because once your Web site is running, it’s nearly impossible to change hosts. Well, you can supersede anything in general, but changing the host goes along with long outages and all kind of troubles with search engines, bookmarking visitors, and financial losses.

What you need is a professional Web hosting service, which enables your business to grow smoothly. You can start with a virtual server account, that is one server machine running web servers for a couple of domains. Then when your traffic grows, you can upgrade to a dedicated server, that is one server machine hosting your domain(s) only. A professional hosting company will handle such upgrades without one second of downtime.

You can work with a Web hosting service located anywhere on the globe. Most probably you’ll make a contract with an american hosting company, because you won’t get a better service at other places. However, if you plan to work on a local market, you must find a host in that country for search engine ranking purposes. For example, a Web site hosted in America is mostly invisible on search engine result pages, when users search for a UK based service within the UK.

Here are a few criteria, mostly of a technical nature, which are crucial when it comes to web hosting. The server’s operating system must be UNIX (BSD, Linux, Solaris, AIX or another *ix). Reliable and safe Web hosting is just plain impossible on other operating systems. You need your own IP address, stay away from any type of hosting where foreign domains are reachable thru an IP address shared with your domain(s). All standard server-sided software, for example Apache, Perl, PHP, MySQL, SSI …, must be pre-installed and the hosting service must have a working concept to monitor and maintain all the software centralized. It should be no issue to get scripts and other software installed by the host’s support staff. The Web hosting company’s data centers must be multi-hosted, that means they must have connections to several Internet backbones. In times of frequently recurring power outages, multi-redundant power systems and standby generators are a must too.

The most important criteria besides a good standing is the quality and availability of technical support 24/7/365. A state of the art Web hosting firm will guarantee an outstanding technical support, providing 100% competent staff answering each phone call in three rings or less around the clock. Sign-up for a virtual account and test it at 11pm and 3am. If it doesn’t work, move on before your Web site is launched.