Choosing a Good Web Hosting Plan
October 17th, 2006 by Jason
From an internet marketing perspective, I should think the following are the key features to look out for in a web hosting plan:
Big Hosting Space and Support for Multiple Domains in One Account
It is not uncommon for top internet marketers to have more that one site. It’s all about multiple streams of income. Choose a hosting account that lets you have multiple domains on one account. It gives you more bang for the buck plus it’ll make life a lot simpler. For that to work for you, you need an account with enough space to host your sites.
Today, hosters are now offering 50GB hosting space with support for 6, 10, or even unlimited domains. You would also want to look for a plan which supports the bandwidth or data transfer required by all your sites. Remember though, do your backups diligently just in case if something goes awfully wrong with your hosting account.
Turnkey Applications Ready to be Installed
Whether you are running a money-making blog or a website, you might want to look for hosters offering ready-to-install applications for your use.
Go for hosters providing Fantastico (look out for the blue smiley logo). Fantastico allows you to install popular open-source applications (like Wordpress, Mambo, Joomla, Coppermine, etc) in just a few clicks. These applications come with huge community participation and support. You’ll find a lot of plugins for these applications which are relevant to internet marketers.
No hosting is perfect. Even with the best hosters, something can fail. This could perhaps be a disk crash or misconfigured server setting. Therefore, knowing that there is a good support team behind your hosting plan is important.
When dealing with support, I can tell you from experience, not all hosters are the same. I have dealt with hosters who took more than a week to reply to e-mail queries and that was after several resent attempts. I even have had queries went unanswered! Things move fast in the internet marketing world. You could be losing customers or visitors should something go wrong with your site.
Go for a hoster with good support infrastructure like ticketing support system, forums, live chat, phone support, or even better, toll-free phone support. Do your part too. When dealing with customer or technical support representatives, be polite; they are human too. It’ll help get your problem resolved faster.
Cost-Effective Pricing
As an internet marketer, you’ll want to maximize your income but beware of those ultra-cheap or too-good-to-be-true hosting plans. Those plans might indirectly cost you a bomb later. You’ll want something that suits your purpose at a cost-effective price.
What about Autoresponders and Shopping Carts?
Although most hosting plans today come bundled with autoresponders and shopping carts, I would recommend using specialized professional services instead. I’ll delve into more of this in the future. Serious internet marketers take this path (professional services). So enough said for now.
Recommendations
I recommend the following hosting companies as all these three met the criteria above.
Sign up here: Bluehost, HostMonster, AnHosting, HostGator
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Just to add, I’m currently hosting this blog on HostMonster.Â