Top Five Mistakes to Avoid When Choosing a Web Hosting Provider

As any online business owner will tell you, a good web hosting provider is critical for operations to run smoothly and for the profits to keep coming in. You do not wish to be jumping from one provider to another. Ideally, the relationship between an online property owner and a web host has to be a long-lasting one.

There is no dearth of web hosting sites. And although, reviews are a help you cannot rely on them completely. In order to ensure that you get the best services from your web hosting company, you need to know how to weed out the also ran's from the top notch service providers.

Here are the top five common mistakes you want to avoid when choosing a web hosting company.

1. You will get what you pay for. This means that do not fall for the lure of cheap web hosting. These invariably lead to issues with uptime and frequent shifting of your websites from one server to another. Cheap web hosting can come at a cost to your business. So be very wary of it. Learn do differentiate between affordable with good service and cheap.

2. Security is paramount. More so, if you are running an e-commerce website. Money transactions have to be carried out in a secure environment. Avoid providers that do not offer (Secure Socket Layers) SSL hosting. Look up the terms and conditions before signing up. Many web hosting services will offer backups as a courtesy and some will back up your data for a fee.

3. Free disk space. This is a corollary of the first point. And if anything, it is an even more powerful lure to sign up. But such hosting comes with severe limitations at a detriment to your business. Your website will be used by the host to display ads. And the traffic that you've worked hard to direct to your website will be siphoned off with no income to you. This is not what you really want.

4. Do not put up with poor customer service. There is no way that you can really measure a hosting company's customer service for yourself till you have actually signed up for it. But there are ways to get an idea. Customer reviews are an indicator. Visit forums dedicated to web hosting. If you come across more than a few gripes about customer service with a given provider, give it a wide berth. Few things are worse for an online businessman than having to wait for a response from the web host about an unexpected issue.

5. As a general rule of thumb, you may want to stay away from web hosts that are just getting started and have not yet built credibility. You do not wish to put your business in the hands of an unknown entity. It is not uncommon for new hosting providers to go overboard in offering freebies and then when they're hit with a resource crunch, in terms of bandwidth or disk space, the customers suffer.

A little due diligence is all that it takes to settle upon a good web hosting service. Once done, you can sit back and concentrate on the business of running your website.

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