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In brief -
With 12 years of dealing with Hosting Companies the ones I use now are DownTownHost and Hawkhost - both have good 24/7 support and 99.9% uptime. I have several
web sites on different hosts so that I don't have 'all my eggs in one basket'.
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The Choice of Hosting Company
If the domain name can be considered the address of your website then your Hosting Company would be the house; the home; and the pages of your site would be
the contents.
We all know that a house needs good foundations and the same can be said for your Hosting Company.
I have experienced the trauma of loosing a site hosted on a 'free' server that was taken over by another company and turned into a disaster. Then again, I
have also experienced problems with a paid host whose servers would regularly go down for an hour or so each week and loose me income and page ranking.
Therefore it pays to investigate your choice of Hosting Company before making a decision.
Hosting Package Features and Cost.
Today all companies will offer more than enough space and performance for a startup website with even the most basic and cheapest package. They all offer
email services, databases, 'back office' control panels and a wealth of add-ons like forums so there is little to choose from regarding package features. Prices are under $10 a
month for a basic package and even less with special offers and discounts for 12 or 24 month orders bringing the cost down to sometimes $2 to $3/month.
Example
For instance, one of my websites has 125 'flat' pages (ie. not database driven), shows 15,000 to 20,000+ page views a day and requires about 150Mb of disk
space (most of which is for the statistical log files) and under 20Gb of bandwidth (traffic) a month. It is hosted on a 'basic' package that offers 3Gb of storage and 50Gb of
bandwidth - ample. The site earns over $1,000 a month and hosting costs under $10 a month so the actual cost of hosting is not the main consideration.
Support
But we must be careful in our choice not to go too cheap. There must be a margin for the Hosting Company to provide us with good support and it is support,
how that support is delivered and uptime that are the key features in our choice.
Support can be by telephone; by email; by a 'ticket' system (like an on-line email) or by 'Live' support like a chat line. I prefer the latter two for most
requests for support. Telephone support can be too quick with not enough time for a considered reply and email can be too slow.
Location
Where the servers are located is not a problem - the files zoom around the world in fractions of a second. It is helpful if the support team speak your
language.
Payment
As the Internet usually pays in US dollars it is easier for non-US residents if the hosting company accepts payment by Paypal (you will need to have an
account with Paypal). That way your income and expenditure are kept in the same currency without incurring the considerable costs of currency conversion.
Conclusion.
I can give no better recommendation than the Hosting Companies that I use - DownTownHost and Hawkhost. If you have more than one website it is prudent to host them
on different servers and different companies. If one server has downtime then the 'outage' does not take all your sites down.
They have modern, powerful servers running Linux/Apache/PhP/MySQL software with a comprehensive Control Panel.
They are based in USA where there is a strong backbone.
Their support is excellent.
Their uptime is impressive and with regular backups.
They take payment in Paypal.
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hill of cash
