5 Mistakes Everyone Makes When Choosing Web Hosting

Web hosting is something that we all need to get our websites online. It's one of the most important decisions you make for your website because it can make or break your success if you choose the wrong web host.

To help make your life easier, I have compiled a list of the top 5 mistakes everyone makes when choosing their web hosting.

1. Choosing Free Hosting Options
Sure, you can't beat the price tag, but is free hosting really suitable? Often it is the cheaper hosting companies that offer a free hosting plan to entice people to sign up. They overload the server with thousands of other websites causing your site to run ultra slow. On top of this hackers take advantage of free hosting to try and access other sites - it's not uncommon to read that a free hosted website has been hacked.

2. Buying Reseller Hosting To Host Multiple Websites
Often people run two or more websites. Generally we have our company websites (or many business sites) along with our personal site. What many people don't realize is the modern hosting accounts can handle unlimited number of add-on domains, which means you don't need a reseller account to have more than one website hosted. Some expensive companies still try and rip off customers by allowing them to only host one website on the hosting account, but you should shop around looking for unlimited hosting.

3. Buying Hosting Through Your Web Design Company
Many web design and development companies are looking to offer value added services to their clients. Many of the clients may not be technically savvy and the web design firms charge high premiums for basic web hosting - often they are reselling shared hosting accounts which cost them a few dollars. Other design companies are hosting client websites themselves on their own dedicated server. This is a bad choice because they may not have the technical expertise to manage a server.

4. Choosing Hosting Through Domain Registrar
Just like web design companies, many domain registrars like GoDaddy and Namecheap are now offering web hosting services. While they are excellent places to register a domain, many people are complaining about the unreliability of the hosting services. GoDaddy in particular is noted for having very unflexible hosting that is not webmaster friendly. It's always best to choose a company that is first and foremost a hosting company.

5. Registering Domains Through Your Hosting Company
While many web hosting companies offer a free domain with your hosting (although usually just for the first year), web hosts are renowned for having high domain registration fees. For example HostGator, while it's a fantastic hosting company, charge USD 15 per domain whereas you can buy the same domain for just USD 9 from Namecheap. On top of this web hosting companies try and charge USD 10 or more for domain privacy, which comes free with many domain registrars.

The key things to take away from this article are to choose a dedicated hosting company for your hosting and a dedicated domain registration company for your domains.

--TINN