A lot has been hyped about hosting plans, but if you know what you want and are clear about your requirements then choosing the right hosting package is just a matter of selecting the right features.
If your website is being developed from an outsourced partner, it is a good thing to ask the application development team about the various web technologies they will use to develop and run your website. Based on this information, the first thing you should consider is choosing the operating system of the web server: either Linux hosting servers or Windows hosting servers. After that ensure that the hosting package has the desired features needed.
You must also consider the programming languages and their versions used. The web programming languages are continuously improved and developed, new features are added, bugs are fixed, etc. This is the reason why it is important to have a web host that has an updated version of that language on their server or at least one that is compatible with your website. If your website is developed using code from a newer version of a programming language, placing the website on a web host that has on older version might result in unexpected behavior of the pages. And it will not be the programmers' fault! It should not be a problem the other way around, so usually if the host's technologies' version is newer; it is compatible with websites developed with older versions.
So, what type of hosting package must you consider?
In case you have a website that does not contain much web pages, then to get your website hosted you would require a minimum amount of disk space and a low to medium amount of bandwidth. They are usually developed in HTML/PHP and do not require a database server. The most common way of uploading and updating the website is through a FTP file transfer. For such websites, hosting on virtual servers can be a good option. You could also consider opting an all-purpose hosting, a plan offered by a few web hosts to meet all your minimum requirements for a small website.
If you have an online shop like e-bay, your website has to accommodate online ordering, must have stock control and also have the ability to create and edit products and products categories and so on. Most of these features are provided by a shopping cart which is developed using Java languages, PHP or Active Server Page (ASP) . Small e-commerce websites usually have a lot of scripts that handle the different features needed like: automated e-mails, mailing lists, integrated credit card payment processing, etc. It becomes very important to have a hosting server with the features to run all of the scripts. The average up time of the host is also an issue, because downtime can mean less sales. Recommended hosting packages include dedicated hosting, virtual server hosting and all-purpose hosting.
If your website is an advanced e-commerce portal with more options for order processing and customer support, your website may need additional hosting features to support the heavy scripting. Also, depending on the estimated traffic, you should consider dedicated or collocated servers for increased resources availability and server access. In order to prevent loosing data, the hosting server should provide automatic periodic back-ups.
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