What should I consider when choosing a cheap hosting account?
There are four basic items you should think about when selecting the right web hosting account:
- How large will your web site be? Estimate the number of pages your web site will have and their content. How many images, music files, video files or other content do you plan to add? The more pages and files, the more disk space you will require.
- How busy will your web site be? Estimate the number of customers who will visit your site on a busy day. The more people on your web site, the more data transfer you will require.
- How many email accounts will you need? You will probably want a separate email for each employee and a few addresses for things like sales@my-business.com or info@my-business.com.
- How important will your web site be to your business? Is it so critical that without a web site your business will fold, or is it more of a competitive advantage that increases your visibility in the market? The more people who use the site and the more it affects their decisions and actions, the more important a web site is to your business.
What is web hosting?
Web Hosting means that you found a home for your Web site on our Web servers, which are stored in a secure, climate controlled environment and are connected to the Internet via high speed data lines.
What is FTP?
FTP is File Transfer Protocol, an internet protocol used to transfer materials over the Internet. It is very fast, very efficient, and very reliable
What about Email Autoresponders?
Email autoresponders are very useful in Internet commerce. Essential, an autoresponder is a robot which resides on your site, and does one thing – when it receives an email – from anywhere – with its name on it – it sends its text back to the source of that email. Uses for these little robots are limited only by your imagination.
Can I keep my domain name when I change a web host?
Yes. We recommend that you register your domain name with a separate registrar before getting a hosting plan. Then, when you need to move to another web host, you just need to point your domain’s name servers to this new host. If you registered your domain name with a host and you now want to move, you should find your registration records or contact this host and ask them how to control your domain name. If you have a problem, you can usually see the name of the registrar by performing a “Whois” query on your domain name and contact them.
What about Space?
Cheap Web hosting service usually assign you a certain amount of space on their computer. 5 MB is plenty of space for the Web pages and graphics for most business Web sites. I once jammed nearly 800 files and graphics into 5 MB. But ask if mail, log files, and system programs are counted in the 5 MB; these can sometimes take up considerable space. Cheap Web hosts which include mail and log files in the count commonly offer 15 MB minimum.
What is uptime?
Uptime is the percentage of time that a web site is working. For example, if some cheap web host has an uptime average of 99.86%, this means that your site will be down for a total about 1 hour each month. Some hosts also offer “uptime guarantees” but this is not as valuable as it might appear.
Can I reduce the amount of data transfer my site needs?
Usually yes. Try to optimize all the graphics on your site. Many GIFs don’t look noticeably worse with fewer colors. Don’t duplicate graphics files, let the browser cache them. Try to clean up your HTML by using relative paths, short filenames, less extras, and reducing the number of spaces and new lines. If your site is mainly text-based, ask your host about using HTTP compression module like mod_gzip.
Can I host my site made with Front Page on a Linux server? Don’t I need Windows web hosting?
Yes you can! FrontPage extensions are available for all plans. You do not require Windows-based web hosting to use Front Page.