Choosing the Right Host

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When visiting web hosts you are immediately bombarded with many of their plans to choose from. Making the right decision and choosing the plan that best suits your needs is often a very difficult decision to make. So, which is the best plan to sign up for? Below I’ve listed a comprehensive guide that will help you in making a more informed choice!

Define Your Goals!
Many new to the internet don’t sit down and actually think about what they want to do on the internet. They spearhead through all the steps in getting an online presence without thinking the whole process through. Setting up your first website may be exciting, but take time to think through your plan thoroughly before you set anything in stone. Do you want a plain vanilla static HTML site, or do you want to have an easy to maintain CMS based website. Will you need to implement ecommerce down the line, or are you only going to supply content? Right the answers to these questions down as they will help you build the foundation of your website.

Registering a Domain Name
Your domain name is the address of your website, and is very important, as it is often the first thing a potential client or visitor will see before accessing your website. It is also a requirement before signing up with most hosts, although you can always point a domain you have registered afterwards to your new web host provider. When choosing your domain, be sure to choose one that is memorable and relevant to what you do. You don’t want it to be too generic like affordable-quality-gifts.com. Try think of something original, use a bit of imagination!

Decide which environment your host should support
Your server needs an operating system in order to run, the two most popular are Linux and Windows, with Linux being far in the lead due to there being no cost to install it, and the security and reliability it provides. This may have already answered your question, but different operating systems come with different control panels which you use to manage your host. Currently the popular ones are HELM for Windows and Cpanel for Linux, both provide extremely comprehensive features for making managing your server as easy as possible. I would say stick with Windows if you plan on developing your site using Microsoft technologies such as ASP.net, otherwise, Linux is by far the superior option.

Deciding on the actually hosting plan
Being a beginner to the internet you should probably start with the lowest hosting plan. These usually only limit the amount of bandwidth, and storage you can use. Upgrading later is very easy to do, with most hosts. Be sure to check how upgrades are processed as you will inevitably need to upgrade at a later stage.

You may be wondering how many shared hosting accounts can offer so much bandwidth and storage space for so little. Most of them you should be wary of, as they do overload their services making your website hosted with them perform very badly. Legitimate hosts like the ones on our list ensure that servers aren’t being overloaded. There core business is not how many customers they can sign up.

Change your nameservers
Once you have decided on a hosting plan, you need to change the nameservers of your domain name. Depending on where you registered your domain name, you need to log into their control panel, and change where the domain you registered is pointing. Changing nameservers can take up to 48 hours to propagate but it usually happens quicker.