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Importance of Hosting for Your Online Presence

by: Matt Coddington

Making a living online is becoming more and more mainstream everyday. All over the net there's a plethora of advice on how to own and operate your online presence and turn it into a sustainable stream of income. People are learning how to create sites, blogs, and forums that take full advantage of affiliate marketing, PPC, SEO, eCommerce, and social networking. There's one thing that seems to get put in the background as unimportant and insignificant. Something that has is rather easy to come by, that everybody uses, but few people really understand. The backbone of every website you visit is its web hosting.

Web hosting is one of the most basic necessities of an online presence yet people tend to ignore the details of it on a widespread level. After all with so many hosting solutions out there, does it really matter which one you choose? They all essentially provide the same service: they host your website and allow visitors to access it. How many variables for a service such as this could there be? There are more than you realize.

Time is Money

The more time you waste dealing with a less-than-par hosting company, the more you take away from your online presence and the more potential revenue you pass up. Ideally you want a hosting company that is quick to respond to customer support questions. When researching hosting companies be sure to call their customer support once, twice, a dozen times if you want before you commit.

You also may want to find a hosting company that does a lot of the server-side mantenance and setup for you. This may cost you a little bit extra, but it's important to weigh the cost of a service like this against how much time it would take you to do it yourself. You also want a web hosting company that makes account management as easy as possible for their customers. Make sure your potential web host uses quality software for server management such as vDeck or cPanel. This will save you a lot of time and headaches later.

Uptime is Money

It seems a lot of people tend to take uptime for granted today. Many new webmasters don't pay too much attention to this because their sites start out with few visitors and quite honestly an hour or so of downtime a month doesn't result in all that much money lost. But just imagine a few months down the road when you've established your website and have created a steady income, and all of the sudden your web host goes down for a day or two. This often happens at the most inopportune times such as when you're featured on a major news site or right after your public release hits the web. Your livelihood is in the hands of your web host, and you have to be sure to use the most reliable you can find.

Almost every hosting company promises "99.9% uptime" when in reality a small number of them actually perform at that level. You need to make sure that the hosting company you commit to has a good track record of keeping their servers online consistently. It's up to you to decifer which web hosting company really does have a good amount of uptime and which company is just a bunch of fluff.

Expansion Flexibility

Whether you're running a brick-and-mortar business or a website you should always keep the possibility of expanding in the back of your mind. A small hosting package may suit your needs for the first few months, but eventually you're going to be targeting more people and driving in more traffic. One thing you definately don't want to do is commit to a small hosting package. Most big hosting companies now allow you to upgrade your hosting package anytime you want, but you should be aware that there are some that will make you completely transfer servers in order to upgrade your package (on top of charging you an upgrading fee).

Overall web hosting despite being mainly overlooked when considering the bigger picture of earning a living online is one of the most fundamentally important aspects of creating and operating your online presence. Always take the proper amount of time to research all web hosting possibilities and fairly weigh each company's pros and cons. I know when you're first starting out you're eager to get your site up and running as soon as possible, but trust me, if you do the right amount of research before you commit to a hosting company you'll definately appreciate it later.