The web hosting business is currently swamped with thousands of companies that are offering the service. Each of this companies claims to have the best services at the best rates. This makes it very difficult for those who want to procure hosting services. Those who are new to the business will find it especially challenging to differentiate between the good and bad providers. Below are a few pointers that will help you make an informed decision when choosing a web hosting provider.

Reliability is the single most important attribute of a good web hosting provider. Reliability covers up-time, fees as well as delivery of the agreed capacity at all times. While some providers have frequent outages, others deliver fluctuating capacity which affects the quality of experience for those visiting your website. A reliable web host is one who can deliver the agreed capacity with no interruptions. Fees are another important aspect of reliability as provider should calculate and charge all fees as per the indicated rates. Some hosting companies have hidden fees and charges that could negatively impact your finances.

You can establish a web hosting company’s reliability through the online reviews and opinions posted by current and former clients of the company. Though they are not always one hundred percent correct, they are a good indicator of what other clients think of the company. If a company has too many negative remarks on its reviews, it is best to keep away.

Another way through which you can evaluate a company for reliability is from the way they respond to inquiries and how well they handle you as a potential client. This will help you know how long it is likely to take them to respond to issues which may affect your hosting once you are a client. If a company cannot quickly and satisfactorily deal with questions from potential clients, they are likely going to offer you very poor technical support.

Although there many other factors that should be looked into when choosing a reliable web hosting provider, reliability should always be at the top of your list of considerations. Once that is assured, you can then proceed to looking at other considerations.

choosing a web host · Technical support · UK web hosting · Web Hosting · web hosting company

Many people have a false idea about how to open up shop on the internet. They assume that it requires the skills of an expensive computer programmer, plus the investment of thousands of pounds in the purchase of a website address and the hiring of web hosting service providers. With any luck at all, your competition will continue to believe this fallacy, and stay away from the millions of customers who do all of their shopping online.

Here at Freezone Internet, we have the UK’s most affordable web hosting packages. Your business can be up and running for less than two pounds a month. That includes everything you need to get started. You get a free domain name, mailboxes, and the analytical web hosting tools that let you know when you have outgrown your current package and need to step things up a bit.

Freezone has been in the web hosting business for more than eleven years. That means we know what works, what you need, and what you can easily do without. We are definitely not in the business of upselling you into web hosting packages you have no use for. However, we can show you how to make a go of it, and then guide you into equally affordable plans with more capacity as your web presence grows.

Perhaps you are already online and looking for ways to reduce your costs, or interested in an upgrade to a more reliable web hosting provider with better options. Freezone is the place for you as well. Our services simply cost less, our reliability rate is always among the industry leaders, and we offer all the tools you need to win.

In addition to a full suite of analytical tools, we offer the easy step-by-step website builders you need to create your own unique, artistic web presence without spending a fortune on consultants, or driving yourself insane with complicated techno-jargon. The whole idea is to make web hosting easy and affordable for our customers.

Once they start to grow, we stand ready to grow right alongside them. Let Freezone show you how to pump up the profit with turn key online purchasing packages and wider bandwidth. Freezone Internet is the fastest, easiest, most reliable, and most money-saving web hosting service provider in the UK. Whatever you need, we can handle it for you.

Cheap web hosting · choosing a web host · Web Hosting · web hosting company

In our previous blog, we looked at some of the broad issues that you need to consider when deciding whether to opt for shared or dedicated web hosting. Today, we’ll look at some of the specific advantages and disadvantages of these two options.

Shared web hosting

Low cost

Shared web hosting is cheap – certainly, most UK web hosting companies offer packages from as little as £2/month including a free domain name and support.

Purchase-to-launch speed

If you have a ready website, shared hosting will allow you to launch it within minutes. Simply visit a web hosting provider’s website, choose and pay for a package and pretty much instantly you’ll receive your FTP login details allowing you to upload and launch your website immediately.

Shared IP

Every server connected to the Web has a unique IP address – a unique identity if you like.  This means that if there are a number of websites co-hosted on a server, they will all have the same IP address. Generally, this is not a problem.

However, if a co-hosted website was to persistently send out spam, the whole server could be blacklisted and effectively disabled taking your and all other co-hosted websites offline.

This is where you need to satisfy yourself that your web hosting company doesn’t host potentially spamming sites and also has robust monitoring software and procedures to ensure that any abusive activity is prevented before it impacts your website.

Speed / responsiveness

The more websites that are hosted on a server, the more requests that server has to deal with. Let’s say there are 20 websites hosted on a single server. If all those are currently being viewed by users, all requests for pages from those websites effectively have to queue up and be fulfilled in turn.

Now in reality, for small businesses with limited traffic (thousands of visitors per day) there is no noticeable change in performance. However, if many of these co-hosted websites were attracting tens-of-thousands of visitors per day, then it may well take a few extra second to load website pages. It is then perfectly possible that your customers will not wait around for pages of your website to load and may click away to your competitors.

Bandwidth and storage

While both of these elements will have set limits under shared hosting, most web hosting companies will allow you to increase these or upgrade to a higher package as your needs change.

Certainly, neither bandwidth nor storage hinder website performance. If you reach the limits of your package your web hosting company should automatically inform you and give you the opportunity to either reduce your usage / storage or simply upgrade.

SSL

Whether you have an ecommerce website or you simply capture customer details through your website, you will need to ensure that any information entered by your customers is encrypted. For this you will need SSL (secure sockets layer) encryption. It keeps data secure and also inspires confidence in your customers.

For shared hosting, a shared SSL encryption seems to the most common solution. In most cases, this is perfectly fine.

However, individual SSL encryption on shared servers can pose set-up challenges. It is, therefore, best to discuss this with your web hosting company to ensure that your needs can be fully met.

In summary, for the vast majority of small business websites including those with significant traffic, shared hosting is a perfect solution. It is certainly the right choice to start with and upgrade as your needs change. Eventually, you may well need to consider dedicated hosting.

In Part III, we will take a look at dedicated hosting in a little more detail.

Bandwidth · choosing a web host · Dedicated hosting · Dedicated web hosting · Shared hosting · Shared web hosting · UK web hosting · Web Hosting

Web hosting. At first glance it’s a simple service and it may take you no more than a few minutes to choose a web hosting company. After all, for most small businesses, all you need is a decent amount of storage space, bandwidth and maybe a database or two. You then upload you website and the world can see what your business is all about.

In reality, of course, web hosting is the single most important service you are likely to use in relation to your website. It’s the connection between you and your potential customers – if your web hosting suffers interruption to service, your website is offline and you are effectively closed for business.

What’s more, if your web hosting company doesn’t offer sufficient support through telephone or live web chat, your business may well be closed for a while.

So, when considering web hosting, look for a proven track record from your web hosting company. How long have they been in business? What sort of websites do they host? Are they based in the UK? (It’s better to have your web hosting company in your own time zone to be confident of getting help when you need it.)

The truth is that most web hosting companies offer similar features. However, support will vary substantially. If your website is at all critical to your business, make sure you are happy with the level of support on offer.

choosing a web host · Small businesses · UK web hosting · web host · Web Hosting

Once you’ve decided to take your business online, perhaps the single most important decision you have to make is to choose the right web hosting company.

And unless you are fairy familiar with this area or have access to advice in the way of your own web developer or webmaster, choosing the right web host is not as easy it might sound.

Given that your website is likely to be the first port of call for your customers / target market, you need to make sure you ask the right questions before signing up with any hosting company.

Here are our 5 top tips when choosing your web hosting company.

1. Customer service and support

Can you get hold of your web hosting company when you need help? And what options do you have  – telephone, web chat, ticket or all three?

Let’s face it, most small businesses don’t have an ‘IT department’. So any issue with your website or email service is likely to prompt a call to your web hosting company. And unless you can get hold of them immediately, your business is likely to suffer.

Therefore, before signing up to any contract, look for prominent contact numbers for customer services and technical support on their website. If a contact number is not prominent, look for another hosting company

In short, satisfy yourself that you can get hold of the company when you need to, day or night.

2. Uptime

Just how reliable is the web hosting company’s service? What’s their uptime? (99.9% uptime is pretty common.) Ask about their data centre. Quiz them about whether they own their hardware or are they providing service through a third party. Enquire about their contingency plans in case of any fatal hardware or data centre failures.

3. Price

While you should never consider web hosting as a commodity and focus on price alone, nevertheless, the cost of hosting a typical small business website should not be much. You can get a perfectly decent web hosting package for as little as £20 per year including a free domain name.

4. Features

Don’t get distracted by features you might never need. Focus on the core items: storage space, bandwidth, mailboxes, databases, easy-to-use control panel (such as Plesk) and free tools (such as Sitebuilder) to create a professional looking website. Most other things are likely to be nice to have but not really necessary.

Blogs and forum facilities are becoming increasingly important. So look for these and also look for available guidance to help you integrate these into your website.

5. Platform

The choice here is fairly straight forward and driven by how your website might have been created. Most websites work under Linux platform. However, if you want to run Windows specific applications such as ASP.NET or MS SQL, you’ll need a Windows platform. If you are at all unsure, a simple chat with your hosting company should provide you with the answer.

Further information – if you have any questions regarding hosting, contact Freezone Internet on 0845 117 0366 or visit www.freezone.co.uk.

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