3 Key Features to Examine When Choosing a Web Hosting Plan

The web hosting plan you use to host your website can be seen as the backbone of all of your online endeavours. It provides the server resources needed for the site to function properly and stay online at all times. Thus, obvious factors that should be considered include reliability, reputation, plan pricing, and server capabilities.

While anyone can examine a chart and/or glance at a plan description page to compare features for themselves, for many novice webmasters, it's not always readily apparent which features should hold the highest priority. The best web hosting provided by bestwebhosting.co.uk will have options for these three key features. They can be summarized as follows:

1. Bandwidth Limits

If the internet is an information superhighway, and each visitor could be considered a vehicle, then bandwidth limits could be called the overall speed limit or traffic capacity. If, therefore, your site doesn't have access to enough bandwidth, when the traffic increases to sizable levels (the goal), you'll start to see a decrease in hosting performance indicated by slower page loading times and potentially even server errors or down time, just like traffic jams on the road. It is important to note that while many companies will promise unlimited bandwidth, sometimes there are still hidden caps and/or overage fees, which are especially important to consider when you're choosing a hosting plan for a website that will need to accommodate high traffic levels.

Recommended Posts

• Why Small Businesses Should Migrate to the Cloud
• Is WordPress or Blogger Enough or Should You Host Your Own Blog?
• How to Improve Online Security for Your Blogging Business

2. Allocated Disk Space

The amount of disk space your websites have available to store files is the equivalent to a brick-and-mortar company's physical warehouse. The larger your warehouse is, the more items (data) your website can store in the long-term, which allows for unhindered growth and expansion. Therefore, if you plan on hosting a large amount of files (especially multimedia content), it would be advisable to choose a plan with at least several hundred gigabytes of disk space, at the minimum.

The amount of disk space your hosting plan provides is dictated by the size of the partition created by your hosting provider. The most powerful hosting plans are called "Dedicated" plans, because they give you remote access to an entire dedicated server. On the other hand, entry-level plans are called "Shared" plans because they require you to share a web server with many other webmasters who have their own allocated partitions. Although dedicated plans are always more expensive, in web hosting you truly do "get what you pay for" in regard to server capabilities and performance.

3. Uptime Guarantees

When you operate an online business that serves visitors in a variety of time zones, staying online at all times is absolutely imperative. For this reason, it's always wise to examine the terms and conditions to find the specific details pertaining to a hosting provider's uptime guarantee policy. A good web hosting company will provide adequate notice when short down time periods are required for server maintenance, and this will usually only happen on very rare occasion. Furthermore, all major hosting providers will migrate your site's operations over to another server while performing maintenance, so nowadays there's really no excuse for any sort of downtime, or a lack of an uptime guarantee for that matter.