Web hosting is a very important part of any business, service or entrepreneurship. One needs to convey their ideas to the external world through the best platform that exists today, the Internet. Not only does it improve one’s reach, it also enhances the probability of someone finding you as the best solution for their particular problem. The complete process of web hosting involves developing a website, then purchasing a domain via which the site can be accessed, and then setting that up onto a hosting plan. While describing it like that may sound simple, the process of web hosting is often very confusing for those who are inexperienced and sometimes even for those with ample experience.
The Frequently Asked Questions
People often have many questions to ask when it comes to web hosting. The first and foremost of these questions is regarding the purchase their domain and hosting plan. It’s understandable how one can get easily confused considering the sheer amount of registrars and hosting providers out there and the broad range of services and prices that they offer. The ideal solution here is to start off with your own budget first. Understand the kind of website you wish to have and what resources you will require. From here look to hosting reviews and online coupons to find your best match. Often times you’ll be able to find your domain name and hosting from the same place.
The next most common question which comes to everyone’s mind is the name of the domain to be selected. Or more specifically the extension for it. With all of the new gTLD’s coming out recently the selection to choose from is huge. The ‘.com’ domain name is still undoubtedly the most preferable one and you might often be suggested to go for it no matter how difficult picking an available one might be. However, settling for a seedy domain in the case of a low budget affair isn’t necessarily a bad thing either. The ‘.in’ and ‘.biz’ domains are very much of a seedy nature and there is not much traffic here. So you can very easily grab hold of these domains at very reasonable prices.
A Few Technical Questions
After all that has been accomplished, it is necessary to obtain a technical overview of things which you might need to pursue sooner or later. Right now your website may only have informative text-based content on it; however what if down the line you plan to expand and offer a downloads section. Will your hosting company be able to accommodate the new space and bandwidth requirements you will have? How easily will they be able to make the changes for you? In most cases these changes can be handled near-instantly by the majority of hosting companies – so luckily you shouldn’t have to worry about this bit. However if you do end up needing to make a switch from one provider to another it is important that they redirect the old website permanently to the new host so that the users do not face any difficulty whatsoever when it comes to accessing the contents.
And coming to the most intriguing questions of them all, “Should my company host its own private domain?” Now the answer to this question is going to vary depending on your exact needs. First off hosting your own domain can be highly inefficient considering the competition in the market where certain companies are completely devoted to managing domains for others (GoDaddy, Namecheap, etc). If you’re running your own nameservers, and handling your own DNS you’re getting into the world of BIND (assuming you have a Linux server) which in the end ends up to be more things your server needs to process.
However, in certain situations, you’ll want to host your own domains. For example, if you firm deals with issues that have high security concerns it might be in your best interests to host your DNS yourself. Furthermore varying on the type of content you are displaying across your site, and the type of TLD you have – certain registrars may place restrictions on certain content types – so keep that in mind when choosing your domain name and deciding whether you’ll host it yourself or let the registrar handle it all.
[box title=”Author Info” color=”#f00″]Aaron Seville, the author, is a creative writer and a technophile. He shares his passion for computers and SEO through his articles. He recommends the cloud hosting from VPS.NET as their service is second to none.[/box]