Hosting
It took me a long time to find this out – but unless you have a truly exceptional website with massive traffic, you are unlikely to need more than 100-200Mb of space. Don’t be bamboozled by trying to compare the massive gigabyte offers of disk space and bandwidth being offered. According to Joel Thieren, owner of Kiosk the average North American web site never gets more than 5 visitors/day – about 300 Mb bandwidth – though if you are going to be successful you will obviously be aiming for much more than that. All the same, he says the disk space requirment of the average internet marketing site is often as low as 2/3 Mb per domain.
Some of them are clearly offering their entire internet connection to every customer and banking on the fact that not everybody is going to be requiring service at the same time.
There are two considerations to bear in mind when deciding where to host your site. It is a simple fact that sites load faster when the server is geographically closer. It’s just a case of fewer miles of cable for the signals to travel along.
Both Google and your visitor likes landing pages to load quickly where you only have a few seconds to grab your visitors attention. If they spend those precious seconds waiting for your page to load that is not going to do you any good at all. This is especially important if you are spending money on Pay Per Click advertising like Google Adwords and sending your prospects to a landing page.
The conclusion is therefore to try to host your site in the territory of your target market. In most cases where you are approaching a global market this is likely to be in the USA which still represents the largest internet market. However, if you are selling to a regional market or advertising on local eBay or Amazon sites then bear this fact in mind.
I used to saay that hosting outside the USA is likely to cost more – until I recently became aware of eUKHost which offers some astonishingly cheap packages. That was until I recently took an account with Bluehost.com offering unlimited everything
at only $6.95/month although you do have to take a 12 month package.
Control your own destiny. Many hosts offer various services, website design, shopping carts, email, autoresponders etc. These almost invariably tie you in to the hosting service. After all, the hosting service is not a charity.
For independence, I would suggest that you select ‘best of breed’ services for autoresponders, shopping carts and website design services that you can host anywhere. That way you and only you have control over your website and how it works.
Control panel/user interface. If you are new to hosting then spend a little time investigating whether or not your host offers a commonly used control panel. When you start to open other hosting accounts with other providers it is very useful if you can select one with the same user interface – saves you having to go through another learning curve!
I have settled on cPanel if only because pretty well every video tutorial you watch on marketing has the presenter using cPanel. So if it’s good enough for established marketers it’s good enough for me.
eUKHost
is probably the biggest host in the UK and I have heard good things said about them by serious marketers who report no problems and good service.
HostGator:
Most people report good experience . A range of packages with the standard being the $9.95/month. No contract required so you can pay and commit monthly. Consider the Reseller package as your requirements grow. As many domains as you like for $25/month.
Bluehost:
As at mid 2010 I’ve just bought a shared hosting account with Bluehost at $6.95 per month on an annual contract. Why? Because their website was so devoid of details of different packages that I was obliged to ring their service number to ask what they offered. The answer was that they had only one service – no limits on disk space or bandwidth.
When I bought the service online about 3 hours later I got a phone call from them to verify that I was the person who had bought the account. I asked; ‘Why?’ and was told it was a routine verification that they do with all their new customers. Now that’s what I call service.
HostMonster
(unlimited domains) Recommended by friends of mine.
Wherever you decide to buy your hosting make sure that they come with good service recommendations. Look for customer service phone number on their site -then ring them and ask where they are located. Do they have a pager response service? If they do then ask for their pager service response time. If they are not prepared to share this information with you then think again.
