Mar 1, 2008 - Simple Three Steps For New Webmaster To Find A [...]

While not fully understanding what is really needed, new webmasters are generally quite easy to fall into marketing traps and ended up with web hosting providers that is not up to their expectations. They may have to move their website several times from one web host to anther before actually able to bump into the web host that fits them.

This trial an error approach to find a suitable website hosting provider is going to take up most of your website development time, and this can be costly as your focus is being distracted on a repeating process, which if it was done correctly in the initial stage, you can fully concentrate on your website development tasks and this valuable time can be allocated to much more productive work like building traffic for your website.

Below is a simple three step approach given by veteran webmasters for new webmasters to find a suitable website hosting provider, follow this guide if you are about to look for a web hosting account and you will have less chances to fall into the wrong hosting partner and a higher chances for taking your website to a success.

1. List All Your Requirements and Expectations

This is a very important steps if you are completely new and do not know what to do, you must first understand what you really need before going out checking web hosting offers, without a proper understanding of your own needs, you can easily be distracted by those cheap offerings and fall into marketing traps like lots of webmasters do. Get a piece of paper and start listing down all the technical requirements for running your website, for example, you are building a PHP website with MySQL database for storing your website data, obviously you will need to look for a Linux based hosting with dotservant.com/knowledgebase/php-mysql/ Support. If you are getting a ready made program, check for the requirements for running the applications and you have yourself the technical requirements for your website.

Getting your technical requirements are pretty straight forward, another more important point is listing down your own expectations from your web host, don't under estimate these as these are actually the factors that leads to the staying or moving from a particular web host. For example, you are new to lots of things and would prefer a more personalized support service that can guide you along, or perhaps offer some expert advice later when you need to expand your website to include more features etc..These expectations varies from one person to another (that is why you always able to find good and bad remarks of a particular service at the same time), and by listing down your own expectations, you have actually gone through a self brainstorming session to find out what you actually need from your hosting partner, and by understanding your own needs, it can prevent you from falling into marketing traps when you are in the process of searching for web hosting offers in
later steps.

2. Get Recommendations From Experience Webmasters

Once you have a crystal clear understanding of your own needs, you can seek recommendations from experience webmasters for web hosts that meet your requirements, do some research on the recommended web hosts and go for those that is getting more good than bad remarks from general webmaster communities, don't worry if you are getting hosting company names that is not so popularly mentioned online, that does not mean they are not good, companies that are mentioned more online are generally those that conduct massive advertising campaign, some good dotservant.com website hosting provider do not always conduct these marketing campaign but their business grow through word-of-mouth, genuine webmasters usually found them through recommendations from advanced webmasters that has been hosting their websites with them for years.

3. Personally Verified Web Host Before Signup

After getting a handful of web hosts that you feel may fit you, you must personally verify each of them before committing yourself, this step is important as I have already mentioned earlier, each person do have their unique requirements and expectations, a web host that fits others may not always fits you too. You should personally check them out to ensure you are partnering with the web host that you are comfortable with, check each shortlisted web host by sending your long list of questions to them, and carefully go through the responses, you will be surprise to still able to filter out those that seem good but give you 'canned replies' or answers not so up to expectations, and identify the one that you are feeling most comfortable with.

A good web hosting partner can directly or indirectly contribute to your online success, you will have a greater chance to success online if you are willing to spend that little extra time initially to find yourself a dependable hosting partner.