Choosing a reliable web hosting service is an extremely important aspect of any website. The web hosting company needs to be reliable, efficient and offer a host of essential features.

Factors such as server downtime’s also need to be taken into consideration to ensure the website is running 100% of the time, if not, at least 99.999999%, allowing for any minor glitches that can be instantly fixed.

As such, time zones also need to be taken into consideration when selecting a web host. For example; a web hosting company’s downtime hours across the Atlantic in the United States will not be the same as in the UK. Depending on the region and times, this could lead to a direct impact on the profitability of a UK based website during core business trading hours.

Casual web users do not hang around waiting for a website to come back online, they simply move on to the next site in search of similar products and services. This means lost traffic, potential sales and a nametag/reputation for being unreliable.

It is also important to know how frequently the web hosting company backs up their servers to ensure data prevention loss in case of attack or server errors.

Customer support is also another aspect which needs to be considered. Although many web hosting companies claim to offer 24 hour support it is not unheard of for users to be kept waiting hours or even days before problems are resolved.

One of the key factors when choosing a web hosting service is to ensure they can provide sufficient traffic bandwidth to meet a website’s needs and potential growth. After all, you wouldn’t want visitors to your website not being able to view your site because you have exceeded your monthly traffic quota.

For serious web enterprises, the cost of web hosting can vary considerably and factors such as the amount of domains or sub-domains which can be hosted and created respectively, email management tools such as anti spam filters and auto responders, the number of databases, available upgrades, built in ready to use scripts, etc, all need to be given thoughtful consideration as to both the effectiveness of their usability and the overall cost.

Professional web hosting (rather than the free web hosting services on offer) is the ideal solution and most cost effective way for small and medium sized businesses to get their business onto the worldwide web.

Although the adage ‘you get what you pay for’ may certainly be true, it is worth taking advice and recommendations from others before choosing which web hosting company to use.

Starting off with a small business web hosting package and upgrading as your website grows with the ability of downgrading at the click of a button, we would like to recommend a service that has over the years proven to be everything and more a business could require from a web hosting company.

Our recommendation
1and1 offer a host of services including both Linux and MS Hosting solutions.

Starting from £9.99 for their Business hosting plan on Linux – with 4gb storage and 40gb monthly traffic bandwidth, 2 x mySQL databases, php 4 & 5 and a whole host of other all inclusive features including the easy to use 1and1 Control Panel where you can manage all your hosting and cheap domains, plus great support and, once your website outgrows one of the 1and1 normal hosting packages up to Professional, has a number of available upgrades to dedicated servers all at highly affordable prices, 1and1 web hosting gets the thumbs up from us.

1and1 also have a number of ongoing special offers and money saving deals with a 60 day money back guarantee.

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