Make a Website and Web Hosting Review

When you make a website, you will need to host your stuff somewhere. You can go for free or go for paid--that's where web hosting comes into play. Sure you can use free web hosting, but it is usually a hobbled down version. If you are serious to make a website, then a proper web hosting solution is the way to go.

There are so many web hosting companies in the world. And so many web hosting plans to choose from to suit each individual needs and requirement. For most of us, we usually don't need dedicated web hosting. It is too expensive and would be throwing away money for nothing if what you need is just a place to show some web pages about your company, your products and services, or just for good old personal blogging with your own domain, or your own online personal photo album and such.

Just key in web hosting in the search engine and voila, you can see there are so many web hosting companies available for you to choose. And I would say there are certainly a lot of them out there. However they are all not quite the same. But one thing for sure the price for hosting has come down a lot and just about anybody can easily afford to have web hosting to make a website.

While choosing, the cheapest web hosting company is not always the best, and of course there are those that provide unlimited space and bandwidth, ie they don't switch off your website once you have exceeded the bandwidth transfer for the month. However even for unlimited offerings they still caution you against excessive use of storage and bandwidth usage. For most normal regular users, chance are very unlikely to use up a lot of bandwidth and storage space, that's why the web hosting company is willing to offer unlimited. They know you can't use up that much anyway and it is a good way for the company to compete against other web hosting companies that offer limited storage and bandwidth transfer so that it looks as though you got a good deal out from them.

In most cases, yes, it is quite nice feeling to know that you have unlimited storage and bandwidth transfer even though you know you cannot usually hit that high.

For myself, I'm using several web hosting solution providers and also have access to others because of the need to help maintain those websites. So here are a few things I noted.

Windows vs Linux based servers - for basic website, there is no difference in the server choice. If the website is higher and require certain speciality, yes, you will need to choose. For multiple domains hosting, your best bet is Linux as Windows usually do not allow multiple domain hosting.

Locality - The nearer the servers are to you, the faster the pages will load. If you want to make sure the speed of website loading, then do take note of where are the majority of your web traffic is coming along as part of the consideration for a better viewing experience for your visitors. If the visitors are well spread out around the world, well you can always please yourself first by looking for a web hosting company nearer to your geographical location.

Unlimited storage/bandwidth transfer - yes, very enticing, maybe good to have it too. Do you really, really need this? Well I fell for it. The webserver was pretty good. Though initially there were abusers who actually hog the server resources. After making some complaints, eventually the company has to issue a warning to all its users saying unlimited does not mean denying other users of the ability to use their services. So in the end, it is nice to know you can store a lot of web pages (but not using it as a back up to store files and stuff unrelated to your website) but whatever you do you can only do so within reasonably use. Still I like their features so I stayed on, at least I know other users won't use up all the web server resources now.

There may be other criteria for the choosing the company. Sometimes too many choices make it difficult to choose. So at first consider your own requirement to make a website, then look for a web hosting solution company to match what you need.

Cheers!
Jan.

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