Website Hosting
Hosting Plans
These are the options given to a service provider such as:
- The amount of domain names you want to have registered.
- How many email boxes you need
- If you need access to a database to hold content.
These may vary wildly and the cost have no relationship to the quality of the service.
Your developer may also have there own server which you can utilise.
Either way, as long as you have control of your domain name, you are going to be able to control where it points and if you find a better offer for hosting, you can simply transfer the whole site.
The advice would be to always go for the lowest plan you need and make it a local company that is within your time zone so if and when you need some one on one support, you can talk with them.
Another point to consider, especially with content management websites, is that the further away your site is from the user, the longer the response time for them to retrieve content, or to get interactive response.
Google downgrades website that take an excessive time to respond or download content. Some data based application will also time out if they don’t get a timely response from the server leaving the user with a very unfriendly error screen.
In some large corporations they use a mirror site in the area of each continent they work in.
Finally, you might want to be aware of what a shared server means. When you have very cheap hosting plans they work on shared servers. This is not a problem most the time but should a co user abuse there share of the server this can slow down all the websites on that server.
This is most noticeable on content managed systems that rely on the speed of the server to provide live access to the content, leaving you waiting 5 minutes for a simple response from the server.
If this happens a polite call to the service provider to alert them to the problem normally sorts things out.