What would happen if you set up a website to show off your handcrafted items, then decided you wanted to sell them? One of the first steps in creating a shopping site is setting up a shopping cart feature. Not every web host supports this feature; however. many do, but if you’ve chosen a web page hosting provider who doesn’t have the capability to add a shopping cart, you won’t be able to do so. Read along for features that you need to look for when choosing your web hosting provider.
Which do you need, shared or dedicated hosting? If this is your first website and it’s relatively small, a virtual shared server is probably good for now. If you’re moving a large website which already gets thousands or millions of views, shared probably won’t cut it. If this is the case, then you definitely want to look into going with a dedicated host.
Find out each potential web host’s uptime–the percentage of time the server is up and working correctly–and avoid web hosts that have a lot of outages. If the company suffers from many outages and tries to offer up excuses as to why they are down, this means they are not reliable and do not have a plan in place to stop these lengthy outages. Beware of those companies who have a lot of downtime. Refrain from long contracts with them, if any at all.
Do you want to use free web hosting? Back up everything on your site, since many free hosts don’t have backup services. You get exactly what you have paid for in this case. If you don’t back up your own data, you’ll lose it forever if something happens to it while on the free server.
These tips should help you get started when looking for a web hosting service. You need to evaluate the needs of your website and find the host that offers the right mix of features. You should avoid paying a premium for features you will never use. On a similar token, do not tighten your belt too much. You may end up overpaying to break a contract when you find your web host is insufficient for your needs, instead!