Web Hosting

There are several website hosting services available providing the space on which one can host his website. These average web site hosting companies will even help their users to set up their own email addresses and provide them the ability to run their own scripts and programs.

Some hosting companies which are considered better than these average companies even provides the facility to their users to use a nice Eye Candy control panel that helps them to manage their site. Some times they’ll even throw in a website statistics app as well. For most web site hosting companies that’s about it! As many web site hosting services are least interested in providing more service to the users for their money.

Many people are satisfied with this, as they don’t know that there’s a lot more for running an Internet business than simply hosting the site.

Most of the people are unknown and don’t know that there are several new companies out there offering way, way more than other companies. These companies serve best features with low cost. Thus the only thing required is that one needs to be well informed about good companies as well as should know the criterion to select an appropriate hosting company.

Features of a good hosting company

Following are some of the features that one needs to know if he is looking for a new web site hosting service or planning to transfer his web site.

He needs to look out for:

1) A web site hosting service that provides him facility to add new domains for a small fee without having to pay any additional monthly fee. Thus a user can host many domains and still pay one monthly fee, thus it leads to saving much money.

2) User always admire a web site hosting service that will help him to publish and manage his own newsletter so that he can regularly follow-up with his prospects and customers and thereby increase his sales. User should also look that if the company is giving him the option to publish a newsletter in both HTML and text format or not.

3) Users are in search of a web site hosting service that can set up an unlimited number of follow-up auto responders, so that they can automatically follow-up with their prospects and send them a series of emails one after the other whenever they want.

4) A web site hosting service should be the one that helps the user to personalize all his newsletters and follow-up emails. So that user can mention the name on the beginning of all his newsletters and emails with something like “Hi George” or “Hi Fem”. Most people know that personalizing emails has proven to increase response rates by as much as 40% – 50% in some cases.

5) A web site hosting service that helps one to set up his own affiliate program so that other website owners can promote one’s site or products and can earn commissions on the sales.

6) A web site hosting service that gives the user the option to track the results of all his advertising campaigns like banner ads, eZine ads, ads in pay per click engines. By the help of these features user will exactly get to know that how many visitors he is receiving from each source, and also how many sales he is receiving from each source. This information will help him to take better decisions as related to what to optimize and what to dump?

7) A web site hosting service that provides user the option to sell multiple items from his web site using a shopping cart that calculate things like taxes and shipping costs in real time.

A web site hosting service that facilitates the user to protect his download page if he wants to sell digital products like e-books or software from his site. Also a website should protect one’s members only site or signup page so that only genuine customers can download his products or sign up for his membership site. Thus avoiding fraud.

9) A web site hosting service that provide security from spam like providing the facility to set up junk mail filters so that any junk mail that one receives, is first filtered out before reaching the account.

10) A web site hosting service that contains built-in anti-virus software so that any virus containing emails that user receives will be automatically deleted.

11) A web site hosting service that offer good costumer support. Fast response is crucial in this field. A good web site hosting service responds his user within 24 hours.

Thus if one will consider the above features while selecting a web hosting company there are chances for proper growth of his business.

You only need to do a search from within Google to give you some idea of the number of web hosting companies that there are out there all over the world. Hopefully as you are going to be a business user of the Internet, you need to be choosing a hosting company that caters for business users and you should not to be tempted to use any of the free hosting services. So how do you decide?

Well when you choose a company to host your Internet business web site, then you want one that is going to be totally reliable, feature packed and have some top class support to help you with every aspect of hosting your site. Now unless you are building a web site that is going to contain thousands of pages, pictures, music files and video streams, I don’t really think you need to concern yourself too much now regarding disk storage size and monthly bandwidth usage. However, your decision should include as to whether you can upgrade your hosting package easily as and when it may be required. By this I mean paying for extra storage and bandwidth should it become necessary, this way you can start on a smaller and cheaper hosting plan and when you grow, your hosting grows with you.

You also need what is called cPanel that also includes Fantastico, this is your main control panel for your web site from where you can easily alter, arrange and set up many, many aspects of your web site including your email addresses, you can set up several email addresses for example, marketing, sales, info, admin etc at yourdomain.com

Now generally most webmasters have a difficulty here in choosing a hosting company, as most always look very similar in terms of what they offer. Which brings me to this point, personally I think you should choose your hosting company from personal recommendations whenever you can as experience can count for a lot. For instance the hosting company I use may not be the cheapest on the market but then again, it’s a long way off from being one of the dearest, but it is one of the best. Let me explain briefly a little more of what you should be looking for when deciding on you choosing the right hosting company.

Below I have listed just some of the points from my own hosting company for you to look out for when choosing your own hosting:

You need to look for hosting that can guarantee around 99.9% up time.

Live support you can talk with a live person is a nice option.

24/7/365 phone support as well as email.

Choose your hosting that includes cPanel and Fantastico.

cPanel demo shows you round cPanel that explains everything about it all.

Their cpanel is one of the best in the industry.

Tutorials (some are shown in Flash) covering all aspects of your hosting.

52 scripts that you can easily install that includes from running your own Blog, to having your own forum, to installing your own shopping mall.

There is a knowledge base also that answers a lot of already asked questions.

A user forum where you can ask other webmasters, questions regarding your hosting.

Whether you can pay for your hosting monthly or yearly.

Offer of a 30-day money back guarantee if things should change in that period.