Hosting
Best Web Hosting
Choosing a hosting company is a very important decision because if you choose a bad one it can be a real nightmare and cost you a lot of money in terms of lost revenue.
I’ve heard several horror stories from my online friends about their sites going down and customer service either didn’t have phone support or took forever to get back to them. This can be devastating considering some of my friends spend hundreds of dollars per day in advertising to drive traffic to their sites.
For a newbie it may be difficult to choose a hosting company because as you search around online you’ll find that everyone has different opinions that conflict with everyone else’s. Hopefully I can save you some time by telling you about my experience. I’ve used three different hosting accounts over the years and have researched many more and my first choice, by far, is Host Gator .
One of the most important features any hosting company can offer is phone support; however, many don’t. Host Gator offers support that can be reached 24/7 by phone, live chat and email. It’s very reliable, my sites have never been down in the last three years that I know of and it’s easy for beginners because it comes with cPanel & Fantastico and it’s cheap.
cPanel is a graphical control panel designed to simplify everything you do with your website and Fantastico is a feature of cPanel which allows you to install free scripts such as a WordPress Blog with just a couple clicks, perfect for newbies. Oh yeah, one more thing about the support, if you need to call them on the phone they talk to you like a regular person and they don’t talk down to you just because you don’t know all the geek-speak lingo.
HostGator offers three regular hosting accounts, Hatchling, Baby and Swamp. I would go with the “Baby” account. It’s under $10 per month and with the baby you can have unlimited add-on domains. This means you can have as many sites as you want and only pay for one account. It also offers 6 gigabits of disk space which is more than enough to host your audio, video, blog, several web sites and thousands of web pages.
Another important feature to measure hosting companies by is bandwidth. Each hosting company gives each account a limited amount of bandwidth. The best way I can describe bandwidth is like minutes for a cell phone. Every time someone visits your site or blog and clicks around, plays some audio or video etc it uses up some bandwidth.
With the Baby account Host Gator gives you 6,000 gb of bandwidth per month. To put that into perspective 1gb of bandwidth is equal to over 100,000 hits to the site according to Host Gator. If your site starts doing really well you can always upgrade to a more comprehensive package. I’ve had several sites hosted on a Host Gator Baby for over 3 years now and have never had any problems. For less than $10 a month it’s a great deal. Look for the Host Gator Baby Here
