Capital Hosting

Web hosting is an important part of your business. It's a bit like the foundations of your home - you need a good strong foundation to build your house on. If the foundation is weak then your home, like your business, could potentially topple over. So make your foundation strong by researching hosting companies before you sign anything. Read on to find out our weird take on the matter.

Feedback: Always do your due diligence when you're researching a web host. That just means to go online and search for the web host's "name" and "feedback." Look past the first few search result pages! You're looking for forums, feedback, comments or discussion about the web host. Look at what people are saying. If there seems to be a lot of negative comments then, well, you know what to do.

Professionalism: A web host should be professional. That means they bill properly, and all the "small print" should be clear and obvious. You should know exactly how much you're paying. In my books professionalism (especially for web hosts) also means having a "live chat" help desk that is available (open) 24 hours a day. You might need it one day!

99% Uptime: You wake up one morning and check your site. But there's nothing there. Hmm. So you refresh the page. Then refresh it again... No-thing. OK so this is something to be diligent about. Sometimes web hosting companies do have "down time" (upgrading their servers etc) and more often than not they'll notify you beforehand. If this happens often you need to start thinking about another host.

Keep It Real: Sometimes web hosts have to deal with mother nature too. I know there were some issues recently with cyclones, flooding etc that caused my own web host to furiously take avoidance actions. I guess it's hard to notify a few million customers immediately a cyclone slams into you. But if this sort of thing is a regular occurrence then, hey, you know what to do!

Customer Service: Expect excellent customer service. That means when you're hanging for life on the end of the help desk because your site has gone haywire over some nasty little plugin, that the support desk can be with you and tend to your issue quickly. Believe me, there's nothing worse than seeing you're number 2 in line now and still number 2 thirty minutes later. I'm ready to throw my Macbook through the window by then.

And by the way, I do use different companies for my hosting and for my domain names. You don't need to do this - but for some unknown reason it seems like a good idea to me. I guess I like to see (and manage) all my domains in one place.

Honestly, you always want to build your business on a strong foundation. After all, it's going to support you (and probably your family too). You'll probably be signing up with your web hosts for the next 10 plus years and they're about to become one of your closest friends too. As weird as it sounds, it kind of works out this way. So, get it right at the start and build a business that prospers!

Now you can have the best web site host in the world. (Or something like that!) Visit my http://IncreaseWebTrafficEasy.com site to see the mysteries unfold. From there you'll get a few ideas about how to boost website traffic and experiment with other amazing website traffic tricks!