In our series on The Perfect Website, we have now looked at Who It Is We Serve (our perfect avatar), What Problem We Solve, How To Dig Deeper Into Their Pain, The Need For Your Own Domain, How To Choose Your Domain Name and What Technical Platform We Should Use. We are thus making very good progress and at this point we just need one more element (actually two) to actually really get going.
This one element that we will look at briefly in this post is the simple question of where to host the website.
Before I provide a few suggestions, let me stress that what I might bring you here is based on my personal views and personal experiences. There may be better choices that I’m just not familiar with. Also there’s an option or two that I wouldn’t recommend only because I have had a so-so experience with them or quite possibly just because one or two other marketers that I trust have told me not to go that route.
When choosing your hosting service there are a number of concerns that you need to have satisfied.
In no particular order you want the hosting service to provide you with sound and decent up times. In other words you want to know that your website is up and running pretty much all the time. You would want them to provide you with a decent support just in case you’ll need their technical help once in a while.
You want to have a good back end. That means that you want to have decent tools arranged in an intuitive set up so that when you do perform functions behind the lines, such as setting up and email address, updating a theme (when sometimes this may be required via the hosting or an ftp account, that you will find it fairly easy for you to navigate around there. Believe, me, some of the hosting services have not made their back ends very approachable in my view.
Naturally there’s an element of getting used to finding your way around in a back end system, but I have found vast differences in levels of easy and intuitive from one hosting service to the next.
With your hosting service you will probably also want to have a glance at the costs and what you will be getting with that expenditure.
It can also be a good idea to check out what back up services are offered. To get a better service you may have to go for an upgrade offer, some call it a pro account and such, but the extra expense can often be well worth it, so that you can rest at ease that you valuable wok is not all of a sudden lost due to a mishap you may make at some point (yes, I have made a few mistakes once in a while that completely rendered my website off the grid).
In addition there can be several technical questions and options you may wish to dive into, but for most starts you just need the basics and you’ll be fine.
Here’s a couple of hosting services that I so far have been reasonably happy with and that I would currently recommend for you to check out:
Hostmonster
Dreamhost
Bluehost
(I am not absolutely positive, but I believe all of these 3 are in same ownership or such)
Inmotion
Disclaimer: At this point in writing I have no affiliation other than being a customer with these services, so at this point in writing I achieve no benefits or compensation from announcing them. That may change at a later point in time. However, also know that regardless of compensation or not, I will only recommend options that I have personal experience with (unless otherwise stated and in which case they would have to be recommended to me by someone I really trust and who knows them really well) and that I personally have been pleased with.
I have had some experience with Hostgator and GoDaddy and possibly one or two others, but these do not rank among my personal recommendations at this point in time.
If you find services that you really love, be sure to share these with me. But if you just want to cut to the chase and get going with your website, then I think you will be well off with one of the above recommendations.
Upcoming Post: I did say that there were actually two more things we needed to look at to really get going. I answered one above and in the next post we get to the other. That other is about the theme you will choose for your website.
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Thanks for coming along this far.
