Domain Hosting
Once you have your website built, you will somewhere to host it, before anyone other than you can visit it. There are many website hosts who will offer many different features at reasonable prices. Here is our list of top questions to ask yourself when choosing a host for your website.
- The amount of Bandwidth you are given: Bandwidth is how much data you transfer, and you are only to transfer a specific maximum in a month. The best idea is to start small and build up as you need it. It's easy to be blinded by unlimited bandwidth offers, but other areas of hosting will be lacking in such deals.
- Customer Response: You will be needing to contact your domain host support. Sooner or later. Ask yourself how quickly do they respond, are they helpful? Are they professional? The best way to gauge this is to contact them by email before you sign up, and ask them a question. Look at how quickly they respond, and their attitude.
- Information: Does the host have a library of information for you to read? Lots of great information is available on the web, but you may not have time to go out and find it all, so has the host collected together articles and other information that will be useful to you with your websites, and is it easy to access.
- Control panel: Some web hosting plans have an easy-to-use control panel which makes setting up your website a fairly simple point-and-click affair. As opposed to needing to write complicated text commands.
- Emails: Can you host emails yourself? Emails will be easy to set up, and allow you to have an email of
@yourdomain.tld.
It's difficult to give an approximation of price for your needs as each case is different, but it's important to look around at other web hosting companies so you can judge prices for yourself.
Once you have found a host you are happy with, you need to inform your domain registrar where to point your domain name so it points to your hosting. This is fairly simple to do, and is achieved by setting up the domain name servers to point to the hosting account. Sounds complicated? Don't worry, your website host will have the exact details of how to do this!