18 January 2011
When choosing a company to host your new website, what are the most important factors that should be considered? There are thousands of companies out there all vying to host your website - so what sets them all apart? They're all the same, right?

When Google first launched all those years ago, it changed the way that search engines worked. Not only in terms of presenting the most relevant information to the end user, but also being the fastest and most responsive search engine out there.

Google was fast. Google didn't have lots of pretty graphics slowing down the site, it just gave us what we wanted.

Fast forward to today, and Google is the second most popular (and therefore heaviest browsed) site after Facebook. The amount of servers and bandwidth they have is staggering, and quite unthinkable for most of us.

Speed

So, what does this have to do with your small website? Well, the most important factor you need to consider is how fast your website will load. Will your site share hosting space with hundreds of thousands of other websites, however small? Will your site have a limited monthly bandwidth, and if you use more than this will your site stop working?

You need to consider how important fast-loading sites are to most people browsing the internet today. Gone are the days when people would accept they have to wait for a site to load. In our highly competitive world, a fast loading site will quite often be the difference between a customer ordering or not. There's plenty of choices for them to shop, so why would they stick around waiting when they could be spending their hard earned money somewhere else.

Shared hosting can sometimes be quite cost-effective, but before you make this choice, please ask how many other sites will share the server time. If the server is bogged down and constantly struggling to allocate resources, then stay away. If however it is properly and efficiently managed, then take a second look.

The fastest way to host your new website will always be on a dedicated server, but this will not be in the budget of most people. Depending on the size and budget of your new website, this is something to consider only if you are making a decent income from the site.

Most decent, reputable web design companies will have two or three dedicated servers which they spread their customers websites across. Though the hosted sites will indeed have to share with other websites, the amount of shared customers will be a lot less than the companies who make their living off hosting. A good dedicated server can easily cope with a few hundred small-medium websites, so contrast this against potentially thousands from a larger hosting-only company.

Don't leave customers waiting for your site to load. Ask questions about where your site will be hosted before you choose a web design company. As people in this modern age we are quite an impatient bunch. We want things fast, and we want them now!