Most Common Hosting Mistakes

You probably already know that every business individual needs a decent online visibility if they are to have any hope of standing out from their competitors and reaching a satisfactory number of clients. And even though some will go at great lengths to have a beautiful and functional website built for them, they don’t always devote as much attention to the choice of their hosting provider, which can be a terrible mistake.We decided to give you a checklist of some of the mistakes that people are making when finding a host, in hopes that you won’t get caught in the same traps.

Choosing the Wrong Type of Hosting

There are numerous types of hosting, including shared, dedicated, WordPress managed, Virtual Private Server hosting and others. Naturally, they all come with their faults and their advantages, and choosing the right balance between the price, accessibility of server settings, scalability  and your immediate server environment can have a great impact on your future endeavors. Consider all the options carefully before you make a choice.

Going with Free Hosting

While this may seem like a nice way to cut the costs, unless you are making your site for fun, you should never build your site on a free server. Not only do these hosting plans come with extremely limited storage and bandwidth, which makes your site freeze after it receives even a moderate amount of traffic, customer service doesn't exist, so if you run into a problem, you’re on your own.

Likewise, the host has the right to do whatever they want with your content, and are even allowed to place any kind of ads they want on your website. Additionally, spammers often use this kind of hosting, so it is pretty much guaranteed that you’ll be in a bad neighbourhood.

Not Looking up Your Provider

There are a number of things that you need to know about your provider. First of all, we already mentioned bad neighbourhood  This is mostly the problem with shared hosting, where you share the IP of the other sites on the server. Provided that some of your neighbours have been blacklisted, you can also end up being labelled as a spammer, regardless of the fact that you never engaged in such activities. Luckily, lists of blacklisted hosts are easily available with a quick on-line search.

You should also make sure that the provider in question provides a satisfactory level of customer support, that their servers are reliable and that you can easily upgrade your plan if your site goes through substantial growth. While on-line research may answer most of these questions for you, the best way to find out as much as you can about a particular provider may be to make use of the trial period that most of them are offering and see for yourself.

Choosing the Provider that Doesn't Offer Support for the Solutions You Need

Depending on the requirements of your site, you will need a provider that is able to offer different kinds of scripts, tools or solutions. If you don’t make sure that the provider is able to do this, you’ll find yourself either having to switch hosts, or give up on some aspects of your website.

This article is contributed by Leana Thorne. she is a passionate blogger and a regular contributor to several Techs blogs. She enjoys exploring new internet technologies and sharing newly found information, and her specialty is cloud computing and web hosting.