Choose Web Hosting - 3 Cash Factors in Web Hosting Guaranteed to Make Your Website Profitable
By: Soon Chai Lim | Posted: 07th August 2009
Few webmasters ever realize the importance of these 3 factors when choosing a web hosting service to host their websites.
Instead, they got blinded by the low price smoke screen that in most cases, renders them a service that gives them chronic migraine, every now and then.
Don't commit the mistake they made. If you want your website to turn into a booming online business, you must swim out to get a web host that comes with these 3 money factors.
The Need for Speed
When you get on a site that loads like tortoise, you'll definitely get pissed off and off you go - you'll jump over to another site that loads faster. Right?
Similarly, if your site loads slowly and you put your website visitors waiting, you'll lose them faster than you blink your eyes. Hence, you need a web host that will host your website on a high-speed server.
World stats shows about 1% of the entire online population still use 56k (or lower) dial-up network - equivalent to about 16 million web surfers world-wide.
Although you can't get them all to turn to more expensive broadband network, if on your part you can use a high-speed server, you'll greatly reduce your website loading time on their computers, astonish them with a higher speed they never get to experience with other sites before.
As such, don't compromise this factor when you choose / buy web hosting service.
So, how to determine a fast-loading web host?
Honestly, you can't tell how fast a server the web host provides until you host your site with it. But even if it appears fast on your screen, it may not turn out so on others due to some still using low-speed network like I said just now.
The only way to identify a fast web host - google the web to learn about certain popular web hosts lots of people rave about. Or you can turn to a trusted expert or website for sound advice and great recommendation to save time.
Tip: When targeting local market, say, UK, you might like to go with your local web host, which in general will load your site faster on your local visitors' monitors due to proximity than hosting your site at US. But when targeting worldwide audience, then you should go with a US based web host - few powerful ones can even load your site super fast on several far locations beyond their US regions.
More Bandwidth = More Traffic
In the context of web hosting, bandwidth defines the amount of traffic allowed to visit a website.
For example, if the web host provides you with a 100MB bandwidth per month, in order for each visitor to view a 20KB web page from your site, you can generate a maximum of 5000 visitors (or hits) per month.
If you drive more than 5000 visitors in that month, your site will get suspended for that month until the next reset takes place on the following month.
For example, by March 25 your site already used up 100MB, then your site will get suspended for the remaining 6 days in March. Once April 1 starts, your provider will reset the bandwidth of 100MB and you can then start to drive another max 5000 visitors again. Get it?!
As a new website owner, you may not hit the bandwidth limit so easily. But what about few months later when your online business begins to get off the ground and the number of your website visitors start to blow up like balloon? 100MB per month would no longer suffice.
You would need a greater bandwidth then. 10GB... 100GB... why not go for unlimited instead?
Unlimited bandwidth means you can drive as many traffic as you wish for all they care, and you need not fear you would hit the ceiling. You won't.
Few reliable web hosts do come with that unlimited power, so go for it - choose unlimited bandwidth.
Note: Unlimited bandwidth and other unlimited resources usually tag along with some conditions. So read up their terms of service or policy on their sites to make sure you don't inadvertently violate the rules.
Uptime Guarantee - Don't Get Tricked!
Website uptime simply means the time during which your website remains up and running on the web.
Ideally, you would want your website uptime to stay 100% because the longer your website remains 'live' on the web, the more money you'll make.
But unfortunately, your website may get turned off due to network or server failure, thus it becomes impossible to keep your website up and running all the time.
Although some very powerful web hosts do genuinely hold a proven track record of achieving 100% uptime straight through 3 months with some of their robust servers, it's nonetheless close to impossible to keep the servers at zero downtime throughout the year as you can't avoid hardware's aging effect and software's vulnerability to virus attack or other buggy issues.
On top of that, server may require occasional reboot upon hardware / software upgrade or for maintenance reasons. These undeniable facts make no honest hosting service dare to guarantee 100% website uptime.
Google and Yahoo can't even guarantee that, can anyone?
When you come across web hosts claiming they can offer you 99.999% or even 100% uptime guarantee, beware! They actually refer to network uptime guarantee only, NOT server uptime guarantee.
Network uptime guarantee means if their hosting network (including Local Area Network and Wide Area Network) goes down that in turns causes your website to go offline, then they'll refund you or compensate you with credits on your account.
But if your website goes down due to a failure with their server that hosts your website, you don't receive any credit or refund from them. Let me cite an example.
A network carries hundreds, if not thousands of servers and other peripherals.
Let's say your website server goes down, but because the whole network carries thousand other servers, so one server failure doesn't really impact the entire network operation. That means, so long as the network keeps running without fail, you don't receive any compensation.
Network uptime guarantee which, to say it bluntly, is actually nothing short of a marketing smoke screen.
A network won't go down so easily unless an explosion takes place and blow up the entire network due to terrorist attack. Or a super lightning strikes the network cable causing the entire network to go belly up. Or a hurricane come and sweep up all the servers to the sky. Or an earthquake damaging an underground network cable. Whatever.
That means, 100% network uptime guarantee... basically any web host can say that.
But server uptime guarantee works differently and benefits you. If the server hosting your website crashes due to system error or maintenance, software / hardware upgrade or virus infection that together accumulate more than 43.2 minutes in that month, you'll receive a refund or credit compensation.
100% network uptime guarantee does sound very rock-solid and can suck you in very easily. But after reading this article, you can now guard yourself against this kind of unethical act.
Hence, watch out for such companies that play around with words. A reliable web hosting company will just state "99.9% uptime guarantee" which refers to both network and server (check with their customer support to verify).
That means, regardless of network or server that results in your website failure of more than 43.2 accumulated minutes per month, they'll refund you or give you credits with compliance to their terms of service.
Note: That doesn't mean your website will go down 43 minutes every month. It's just a guarantee to you that should your site gets shut down beyond that, you'll get the refund or credits. In actual fact, your website may run at 100% uptime straight through several months especially when hosting with a reliable web hosting company.
Remember, the lesser the downtime for your website, the more money you can make.
Want your website to capture more traffic and convert more sales online?
Soon Chai Lim, an "underground" Internet expert, personally recommends this best reliable web hosting service that has helped him create an extra profits of $2000 to $5000 every month ever since he changed to this web hosting service.
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Tags: google, web hosts, web hosting service, web surfers, loading time, website visitors, time tip, loading web, sound advice, smoke screen, low speed, broadband network