To stay competitive in business you need to have an online presence which means you must have a domain name and a web hosting service for your business. Starting a blog can feel intimidating, and even frustrating sometimes. 

A website is just a bunch of files stored on a computer known as a web server which consists of a special software to enable websites to run. Therefore choosing the right domain name and web hosting is very important for your business.

If you are not a web developer, creating a website can be confusing. How do you choose a domain name? What must you do to maintain it? And what happens if your domain name expires? How do you choose a web hosting company and what web hosting package will serve my business?

You can get answers to these questions. Many niche website owners have to battle with all these confusions.

Netcat Technology Solutions Nigeria makes it easy for you to choose the right domain name registrar and web hosting company for your business

Domain name registration, web hosting and website management.

You will agree with me that finding your niche market is the first step in creating a successful online presence for your business brand.  Finding a niche market or a subset of the general market of your interest is not an easy task.  Example of a niche market is “weight loss” which is a subset of the “health market”. Failing to find a specific niche market and branching out too wide is the major reason so many websites fail to gain traffic and money. But it is not too late to narrow down your target market and become successful in your chosen niche.

If you are considering developing a website of your own make sure that you get a good web hosting company and hosting plan.

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FREE WEB HOSTING SERVICE

Many people may decide to use a free web hosting service for their websites or blogs.  Blogger and WordPress.com is a free hosting platform that you can use. However, there is a big danger is using free services if you want to build a long-term business as an entrepreneur.

You can be denied of your free hosting suddenly. Assuming you spent 3 months building up a blog with lots of beautiful content and a following of faithful readers. Then, one day out of the blue, you realize your blog has been wiped clean. All the hard work, followers and traffic will be lost.

Some free services like WordPress.com prohibit the use of affiliate links on your free blog. This means that you cannot make money with your blog.

There various hosting plans like shared hosting, dedicated hosting, VPS hosting, Word press hosting and offshore hosting.

AVOID THE MISTAKES NEW WEBSITES OWNERS MAKE

Many people think paying little for a web hosting service will help them in saving their operational cost. On the contrary; the cheaper hosting providers usually cheat you on infrastructure, support, and security in an effort to gain back every possible dollar they spent on computing resources. This means that their service will be poor. While hosting providers who charge a little bit more do so in order to provide your website with stability, security, backup, monitoring and 24/7 support.

TOP TEN CHECKLIST BEFORE CHOOSING YOUR WEB HOSTING PROVIDER

Whether you are launching a new website or thinking about switching to a new hosting plan. Choosing a web hosting plan can be overwhelming. There are various types of plans, features and add-ons to choose from. The difficult part is to pinpoint the plan that serves your business need.

We have put together a checklist of the important things you need to know which will help you choose a good web hosting provider.

1.How large is your website?

Websites come in different sizes. Think carefully about how large your website is and also make room for the growth of your website in the future.

2.How much security does your website need?

Nobody wants to be hacked. Some websites need some level of security. If you plan to make sales through your website or your website collects information from visitors e.g. credit card information, names, passwords, emails etc. then you must secure it with SSL to protect user’s data e.g. 256-Bit AES Encryption is good for protecting your website and it can be bought from your hosting company.

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3. Pricing of the web host

Cost is one of the factors you should consider when choosing a web host for your website. Firstly, you need to know your priority for the website. An ecommerce website must use a dedicated web hosting service or VPS hosting which will give you enough monthly bandwidth to allow many visitors to use your website concurrently.

A website for small businesses can manage a shared hosting service. Check out user reviews about a hosting provider before choosing any web hosting service.

4. What is your websites estimated traffic?

A new website will normally have little traffic and grow with time. But you should expect tons of traffic if you are already a big and popular brand with reputation. If you have an already existing website then you can look at your analytics to see how much traffic your website is getting. You can use Google analytics by monster insights to get website traffic reports. The information will help you to calculate the website traffic to determine if you need to scale up your hosting plan.

5. Full Email Services and additional domains?

Any good web hosting provider will provide you full email services e.g.  POP, and IMAP mailboxes and unlimited email addresses. IMAP is better because you can view your email addresses on multiple devices. It gives you more leverage and power. These services should be part of your standard hosting plan so you don’t have to pay for it.

Your business might want to explore some other business ideas and therefore you might need more than one domain. Your hosting plan should allow you to have multiple domain and sub-domain names when you need it.

6. Web-based administration

Your web hosting company must offer you an administrative back-end for managing, configuring and administering your website files and database. The administrative interface is called cPanel or Plesk. This allows you to manage every aspect of your hosting via the internet.

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7. Site builder?

If you are developing a basic website on your own, then you will be glad to have access to templates or a website builder to make the process easier. If you will be hiring a professional web developer to develop the website for you, then you should tell them all the features you want on the website to enable them advise you on the best hosting plan.

Your hosting provider should have a free website builder that is easy to use. If you are not a savvy web developer then you will have access to templates and a website builder to make easy for you to build your website. If you need to hire a professional web developer to develop the website for you, then Netcat Technology Solutions Nigeria is here for you.

Contact us for web development services

8. Services, Scripts, and Software

Good web hosting companies always have a vast library of software’s and scripts that you can use to develop your website faster. They should also offer ecommerce software’s like shopping cart software. The scripts and software’s are bundled inside in an easy to use library called Fantastico or Softaculus. Your host should support the latest Java, MySQL, PHP, Real Audio, Shockwave, Real Video and etc.

An example of a cpanel script is the one click WordPress installation available on the Fantastico or Softaculus software library.

9. Power and Daily Server Backups

Good web hosting companies use a backup power system and perform daily off-site backups of your  website to an offshore datacenter and replicate it across multiple datacenters to make sure that a backup copy of your website is always available no matter what happens to hosts server. This makes sure that you won’t lose anything in case the hardware crashes or there’s a natural disaster.

Few web hosting services provide automatic database or server backups so you have to additionally pay them to create full backups for your whole sites. I recommend you to use this host because it’s affordable, provides many hosting features you will like and offers automatic backups for Websites.

10. What is your Web Host’s downtime and technical support like?

A reliable web hosting company will be 99.9% up most times. You will lose money each time your website goes down. You will even loose more money if you spent money on a new marketing campaign when your website went down. You have to choose a web host that you can depend on to keep your website up and running all the time.

The technical support of your web hosting company has to be good also. When you run into problems, then you have to email them or send them a support ticket. It can be very frustrating and possibly cause you to lose a lot of money if you need to wait for days for a reply. A good web host’s technical support should be available 24 hours a day throughout the year by phone, live chat, support ticket and email.

Conclusion

If you are looking for a fast, reliable and secure web hosting for your website, use the top ten checklist we mentioned above.  I will normally recommend that you should start your search here.

How much time do you have to waste trying to figure out which web host or domain name to use?  You don’t need to kill yourself.

You can contact us for advice and web hosting recommendation.