Capital Hosting

When you're ready to get hosting service for your online business, you have some important decisions to make before you hand over any money. For the purposes of this content, I'm going to assume you're looking at paid hosting services instead of free hosting services (since I assume you want a professional website that's not filled with advertisements from the hosting company). As you conduct your due diligence on the many companies out there, you might be wondering what exactly should you be looking for in a hosting provider. That's exactly what I'm going to cover now.

1. Reliability and Download Speed - The success of your business relies on your website never going down and having fast download times. The kiss of death to your website is when people can't access your website, or it takes too long to download. People are impatient and they will go somewhere else. The hosting provider should be both reliable and fast, at a minimum of 99.5% uptime. Uptime is the time when your website is functional. Download speed is measurable with free online tools, but most companies won't say what their download speed is. Ask for sample websites on their servers and test the speed yourself.

2. 24/7 Technical Support - Things happen and stuff goes wrong, and always at the most inopportune time. The last thing you want to have is a hosting company that is not available for you 24/7, especially on weekends and holidays. Your website being live and available at all times is everything (which I've said before but need to drive the point home). You should be able to call them and chat with them at all times. I recommend testing them at all times of the night and morning hours just to make sure their response times are appropriate. Plus, test their knowledge to see if the quality of the tech support is the same as during 'normal' business hours.

3. Email, POP3, Mail Forwarding - If you have your own site and you want to be professional, you're going to want to have email addresses with your domain name, like This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Solid and reputable hosting providers include unlimited email addresses with their hosting packages, so make sure yours does too. However, it doesn't stop there. Make sure you can retrieve your email with email software, or make sure you can forward your email to another provider, like GMail.

4. Control Panel - The reason you pay for hosting service is to have complete control over your website. The hosting service must have a control panel included with the service, or just walk away. A control panel lets you manage different aspects of your account yourself, like adding or deleting domains, adding or deleting email accounts, installing WordPress (if applicable), etc. Without a control panel, you don't have complete control and you're relying on other people to help you with your business. That costs you both time and money, which you can't afford to lose.

5. Multiple Domains and Subdomains - If your online business plan includes multiple websites, or you want to leave the option to be flexible in the future, make sure your hosting provider includes unlimited domains and subdomains with the package. If they charge an extra fee for each domain or subdomain, either find a company that doesn't charge for these items or see if there's a package that has these features included. It's in the best interest of the hosting provider to have multiple websites from you because they'll make more money with you in the long run.

* Note * - Be careful of companies that offer very low packages with 'unlimited' disk space and 'unlimited' bandwidth. Trust me... that's not the case. If it were, then why would there be higher packages and dedicated servers that cost significantly more that the starter packages. The rule of thumb is your hosting prices will increase in relation to the amount of traffic your website receives.

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