There are a couple of things that you will need to consider before choosing web hosting for your business.

1. Choosing a domain name

First of all you will need to choose a domain name for your company’s website. The name you choose should relate to your business or be the name of your company. Obscure domain names will make it harder for potential customers to recognise and find your website. Check if the domain name that you want is available here > Domain name checker!

2. Hosting Requirements

You need to consider the basic requirements for your website.

For a small business site it would be best to choose a shared Linux web hosting package. Linux hosting is commonly cheaper than Windows web hosting so unless you require services such as ASP and .NET Linux hosting is preferred. The type of hosting that you choose does not reflect the operating system that you have on your computer.

Up-time- Check the up-time guarantee stated on the hosting companies website. You will want to find a host that offers 99.9% + up-time to ensure that your customers can find your site at any time.

Disk Space – Most websites use less than 50mb of disk space so to be safe its best to look for packages that offer around 100mb. If you have lots of large files on your website then you will need to find a larger hosting plan however try not to be lured into web hosts that oversell their services.

E-mail Accounts -  A handful of e-mail accounts is usually enough to satisfy most businesses so just check the web hosts site to ensure that there will be enough for your needs.

E-commerce Support – If you have intentions to sell products online you need to ensure that your web host supports features such as SSL certificates and e-commerce software.

Server Location- As your website grows so will your customer base so you need to look at where they are located. If you have 70% of your customers in the UK, it is recommended that you select a UK hosting plan so that the majority of your clients have a slightly faster connect to your website.

Hosting Support – As a business if you have any website problems you will want to have these fixed as soon as possible. Plan for errors to occur and check that your web host has fast technical support to resolve any issues that you may have as not to affect your day to day sales.

The Internet is a large collection of computers all connected together in one very bignetwork. A diagram of the Internet looks similar to a spiders web. A website is a place on that web, and website hosting means providing the physical location, the connection and, usually, the computer that “serves” the web site’s content to the PC that requests it. Web servers or computers are installed with special software designed to handle many users and services simultaneously.

The Internet is a global network, which means that communication can occur at any time. This means that a website should be ready to receive visitors at any moment. For this to be achieved there should be a constant connection to the web and a server that is always powered on running a stable environment.

The physical environment where the server is located, often called a Network Operations Center, or NOC is also very important. Data Centres have temperature controls, backup generators, earthquake-resistant architecture, and more, all designed to ensure your site is available at every moment.

When you are creating your website at your home computer, to upload it you need to send the files to your web server. FTP (File Transfer Protocal) is a service that allows you to do this. Once the file is on the server, whenever someone requests that file from the Internet either by typing in the web address or clicking a link, the server gives them the file they requested. Changing the content is as easy as changing the file and re-transferring it to the server.

In addition to web and FTP services, web site hosting almost always includes an email server that will receive email sent to your domain. This enables you to control mail delivery, create your own addresses, and present a professional image to your customers, clients, or constituents.

Do iUKHost support WordPress web hosting?

Yes, WordPress is available with any of our web hosting packages. You can quickly install WordPress from the Fantastico section in cPanel. This enables you to install WordPress in a matter of minutes without having to have any technical knowledge. WordPress is one of the most widely used free blog platforms available, it makes management easy with third party plug-ins & ability to upload your own themes. iUKHost provide reliable blog hosting services at an affordable price.

The powerful administration panel allows you to write posts and publish them at the push of a button. You can also manage previous posts, make updates & view comments made by your readers. Here are some further features of WordPress:

• Full standards compliance
• WordPress Pages
• WordPress Links
• WordPress Themes
• Cross-blog communication tools
• Comments
• Spam protection
• Full user registration
• Easy installation and upgrades
• Password Protected Posts

Learn about more of the features here.

Shared Hosting or Shared Web Hosting is one of the most common types of web hosting available. It is a basic form of hosting where many websites share the resources on one server. This is the ideal hosting to get your first website started. If your website simply consists of html pages and has no scripting then shared hosting is ideal. Shared web hosting is currently the cheapest hosting solution.

Shared hosting is ideal for small websites that receive a small amount of traffic. This is because if you have a small website you are unlikely to need large amounts of disk space or bandwidth. There is no reason why you should pay for resources that you do not need.

See iUKHost shared web hosting plans here.

Everyone has different needs when looking for shared web hosting. You will need a certain amount of space and bandwidth for your website. You may also need databases, add-on domains, sub-domains and e-mail accounts. You should check with the host that the package will meet your needs.

Over Selling Resources

A small website will not need many resources; however people are caught in the headlights by large numbers. A large majority of web hosts on the Internet oversell their services. You may have come across plans that include 500GB Space and 2TB of bandwidth, this is overselling. If you were to actually use all these resources I’m sure the host would soon close your account on the grounds of “high CPU usage”. There is no need to get lots of space and bandwidth, simply get what you need at a moderate price.

Resource Limits

Most shared hosting will have resource limitations such as CPU etc. This means that you can only use X% resources for your site for X amount of time. If you are running scripts, check that they can run in the time limits set by the host. You should also check database size limits, and outgoing e-mail limits that may be in place.

You may only be able to have a database up to so many MB. If you have a forum then this is likely to grow and you may need to upgrade so you might want to plan ahead and see how easy upgrades are going to be. E-mail limits may be set hourly which means you can only send for example 200 e-mails an hour.

Reseller Hosts

Reseller hosting makes it easy for anyone to setup a web host. This means you need to check to see how reliable the host is. The last thing you want is a weeks hosting before the person running it ditches their hosting site leaving you with no money and no hosting. To avoid this look for a host that has good reviews from others and is well established. If you are insistent on going for a certain host check how long they have been operating for, if they are a registered business and you may also check there PayPal transaction rating if this is available.

More on Reviews

There are many review sites that you can take a look at, however it is likely that the host themselves have added their website to allow reviews. This also implies that they have the ability to edit and remove reviews that have been left. The best place to get reviews is from existing customers – how obvious was that? You can do this by running reverse IP on the hosts IP address. This will allow you to get some of the web addresses on that hosts server.

Hopefully you will not get other sites run by the host so check the WHOIS info to different details and send an e-mail to the site owner asking about the service. You may also want to Google terms such as “hosts name reviews” or “hosts name scam” to see what comes up. Forums are another good place to ask, however if someone simply keeps saying the host is great, check the website URL that they have hosted with the host to ensure they are not just self promoting.

Up time

Up time is very important in hosting and now many hosts have a service level agreement that ensure you receive X% of up time. You may want to use external monitors to see what the up time for a web host is like. The only real way to find the truth is to ask previous customers due to some monitoring sites allowing hosts to remove outages from statistics.

Support

This is one of the most important things in hosting. Check what types of support are available. Do they have Phone, E-mail, Instant Messenger, REAL Live Chat or Ticket Support? If there is a problem with your website you want it sorted asap so ensure that the facilities are there for you to receive help when you need it. Ensure their after sales support is as good as their before sales.

Summary

Always go with a host that has a good reputation for up time, pricing and customer service. New hosts with great deals might to be around for too long due to lack of experience. It only takes one thing to go wrong with a small host that removes their budget for servers so ensure that your host is there to stay.

Those are a few basic things to look out for; more advanced users may wish to check that the server IP is not black listed and that they have a good server infrastructure etc.

Robots.txt file is used to tell search engines what they are allowed to access on your website. The purpose of this is to stop search engines listing private and sensitive data such as admin login areas.

If you are happy to let search engines visit all files and folders that exist with your website then you do not need to use a robots.txt file. If you do not need to block any content then do not have a robots.txt file on your website.

If the file is incorrectly coded then you run the risk of blocking important content that you may want search engines to list.

If you want a robots.txt file to allow all the content and you really want to have one on your website then create a txt file called robots.txt and enter the following:

User-agent: *

Disallow:

For more information about robots.txt see here!

Once you have created a favicon you need to upload the filename.ico to your web server.

Then to add a favicon to your website you simply need to insert the following line of HTML code into the head section of your web page.

<link href=”/images/favicon.ico” rel=”shortcut icon” />

After you have done this, refresh your browser and if all is correct the favicon will appear. Some browsers update much quicker than others.

iUKHost would like to wish everybody a very merry Christmas & a happy new year.