Digital Hosting Tips from Medway Digital

Medway Digital Hosting Tips

1. Your Host Up time Guarantees and Support

   You will want to find a hosting company that has a history of excellent customer service. Remember, every moment that your site is offline,
   you are losing out on money and potential visitors, readers and customers. Research any hosting company that you are interested in and
   check out its user reviews before making the purchase.

   Now days support policies are changing some what and you’ll need to read the hosts terms of service carefully. Since hardware infrastructure
   is becoming more resilient (fail overs, load balancing and high availability) on cloud computing, hardware support is becoming less frequent.

2. What is really offered for free?

   When looking at the specials, free offers and discounts, look very closely at a) the terms, b) the period over which they extend and most importantly
   c) what happens at the end of the “honey moon period”.

   Many people and small businesses get caught out by these “free offers” as they usually advertise heavy discounted prices if taken over 3 years. This would
   tie you into the same host for that period, even if there support and up time is not what it says on the tin leaving you with 2 options: 1. Transfer away
   and loose money already spent, or 2: Stay and hope they improve as a risk of loosing more business. Look for short terms deals with money back
   guarantees.

3. Hosting Control Panel

   Most people and small businesses are not techies when it comes to understanding the ins and outs of hosting, so having hosting with a
   control panel such as Plesk or cPanel will make your life easier. You can quickly add addon domains, create FTP accounts, setup your
   email accounts, read your email online, edit your website with the file manager and many other things with it.

4. Application or Software Considerations

   When you got to the real essence of your hosting, you’ll probably already have decide on which platform to host on, whether is on Windows
   or a flavour of Linux. You’ll also already have decided on the scripting platform to, such as Microsoft’s Active Server Pages or PHP. Many of the works free
   open source scripting applications (for the web) are built on PHP (aka Personal Home Page or later known as PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor).
   Ensure the host supports your chosen programming language or application.

5. Additional Services Available

   You need to think about services that the host could offer you (as reasonable prices) such as e-commerce integration, backup and resilliency, internet marketing
   and web site optimisation. These are only a few of the services you may need, but will help increase your awareness and portfolio on the net.

   .

   SAAS – is it available? What is SAAS? Sofware As A Service. This is a reasonably new service that many larger hosting companies offer. The service really manged hosting
   of open source applications such as wordpress, joomla, os-commerce and the like. SAAS is not for everyone, but does offer increased gaurentees
   for upgrades to the latest versions, security patches and more.

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