A Beginner’s Guide to identifying and choosing a reliable but Cheap Web Hosting

Cheap and reliable are two aspects that may not be seen together in all the cases. An extra care must be taken before choosing a cheap web hosting provider.

‘World Wide Web’ is simply an excellent place for sharing information. Those interested in owning a little ‘web space’ must have a clear conception about the term ‘Web Hosting’.

The information that we view from the web browser is basically contained in a number of web pages. The computers that contain these web pages are known as ‘Web Servers’. Australian web hosting is all about storing these web pages for the viewer’s to easily access them. Many people plan to host their websites themselves but usually they find themselves fighting with countless issues related to the right kind of software and hardware in order to host the web pages successfully. Using a web hosting company that offers excellent capabilities on its web server can save you from most of these worries.

These days there has been a significant elevation in the number of website hosting providers in Australia. When it comes to choosing a web hosting company, we usually find ourselves in a fix with so many cheap web hosting companies available in the market.

There are several kinds of cheap web hosting companies but Australian web hosting can be broadly divided into following categories:

• Virtual web hosting: It is also known as ‘Shared Hosting’. As the name very well suggests, innumerable websites share the same space on one or more physical web servers.

• Dedicated web hosting: In contrast to Virtual website hosting Australia, dedicated hosting allocates a particular web server that can be used only by a particular customer. A dedicated web hosting company provides several benefits to the customer. The customer can host even multiple websites from that particular server, change the software configuration, modify the bandwidth and handle greater traffic on the website.

• Co-location Website hosting: In dedicated web hosting Australia the customer rents the web server, which basically belongs to the web hosting company. But in co-location website hosting the customer can own the web server and hence have a full control over it. The charges vary depending upon the rack space and the monthly bandwidth.

• Reseller web hosting: In this type of website hosting, a web hosting company provides web server storage to the reseller (i.e. the third-party) at reasonable rates, who then again resell this particular web server to a number of customers. To these customers, it is the reseller who acts as the web host provider.

Undoubtedly, a website plays an important role in building-up any business. Australian web hosting companies can easily be found on internet and you can go through the terms and features of their hosting plans before going for one of them. It is important to note that cheap and reliable often do not go hand in hand, you must evaluate your website hosting options thoroughly.

Making a Choice of Web Hosting Plan

Choosing a web hosting plan is one of the most crucial decisions. Finding a good web host can be very complicated. It is very important to find a right host, so that all your hard work will not get wasted and you will get the value of your labor.

With so many web hosting providers how can you choose the best one for you? You need to figure out your requirements and choose the one that best fits your needs. Here are few of the pointers which can help you to move in right direction to find out the best web hosting.

There are different types of web hosting accounts. Firstly, you have to decide what type of hosting account will fulfill your requirements and will be best for your business.

Free Web Hosting
There are many free web hosting sites available on the web. You can save your money by considering free web hosting services but usually they do not have great functionalities. There are many limitations or using free web hosting services which includes lower bandwidth, smaller size of hosted files, doesn’t allow certain files like MP3, ZIP files etc.

Generally, with free hosting services, you have to place their advertisements on your web pages in the form of banners, pop ups or other adverts. Thus these free services are not preferred for online businesses.

Shared Web Hosting
Shared web hosting is the most commonly used web hosting service and also called virtual hosting. It refers to the web hosting service where multiple websites hosts on a single web server for multiple customers. On server, each site has its own section or place which keep it separate from other sites.

It offers more limited functionalities  than dedicated hosting but provides enough bandwidth and storage space. Thus it is the most economical option for smaller business websites as many people share the overall server maintenance cost.

Dedicated Web Hosting
Dedicated web hosting servers are the type of hosting servers where client do not share with anyone but leases an entire server. In this, client have  full control over the server including choice of operating system, hardware, etc.

These are much more expensive than shared hosting servers and to operate dedicated servers, a higher level of technical skills are required. This gives you much more place to grow your business.

There are few of the features which one have to keep in mind while going for any web hosting service.

Uptime: It refers to the time during which the site is fully operational without any restart. Reliable servers can go for months without any reboot. If your web hosting always goes down,  it will hurt your website because visitors could not access your website whenever they needed.

Storage & Bandwidth: Storage space will define how many files you can store and depend upon the size of the web site & the type of files it stores. While bandwidth defines how many times visitor can request your files. It refers to data transfer which means the amount of information passed to & from the site.

E-mail accounts: With web hosting package, you will get the email accounts which can be customized by yourself. The number of e-mail accounts you need may affect which host you choose.

Support: Another important feature which must be keep in mind is, how good is the web hosting company in providing customer support? If you have any technical or billing issues, there must be quick response, so that you there will not be any problems.

How Web Hosting Affect On SEO?

Can Web Hosting Affect Search Engine Results of your Website? I have seen many people concern about web hosting of their sites. I believe that search engine optimization of your site is not directly affected by web hosting. But it can affect your search engine rankings and traffic on your website in other ways. There are many ways in which web hosting can adversely affects the search engine efforts. Few of them I have listed below:

1. Server Speed: For SEO, website speed is necessary for a healthy indexing. Search engines do keep an eye on the time it takes for your site to open each time a browser makes a request for your website. If a page takes a longer time to upload, the user will lose their patience and goes to some other relevant sites for information. Search engines notes how long a user stays on your site and if more people returns frequently, than it will assumed that there is nothing worthy and do not have good content to keep your user on the site.

2. Uptime: Poor server uptime will effect the indexing of website on search engines. When spider trying to crawl your site and failed to index because of site is not available or it receives 404 error “Page not found”. For SEO, website must remain online all the time. Any downtime can be a fatal.

3. Black listed servers: If your site is sharing an IP address with an site that sends out spams, adult sites, host illegal or any other illegal activity than google may ban your sites. Which is definitely not good for your business.