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Thanks to different content management systems and WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors, building a website is easier than ever, and you don’t have to be particularly tech savvy in order to do it yourself. However, choosing the host for your website will require you to be familiar at least with some of the basic aspects of hosting. For those of you who are about to sign their first hosting deal, we made this list of common mistakes, and offered some ways to avoid making them.

Keep Your Domain Separate:

Most hosting companies also offer domain names. Since domain name purchase and signing a hosting deal often go hand in hand, most people assume that the most convenient solution is to simply buy the domain from the hosting company. And, while it may indeed be easier to do so, this approach does come with a serious drawback. If you outgrow your host, or simply find that their services are no longer adequate, having a domain name that you’ve purchased from the third party will make it much easier to
simply transfer it to the new host.

Learn About the Hosting Basics:

There are a number of different hosting types out there, all of them with their unique advantages and disadvantages. Make sure that you know enough about each of them before choosing the one that suits you most. If you are making your first website,
chances are that you’ll be best served by a shared or Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting provider, but if you are building the site in WordPress, you might prefer the services of managed WordPress hosting provider.

Research the Provider:

There are a number of things that you need to find out about a provider before signing a deal. For one, you should inquire about their security, and how easy their servers are to hack into. If you are thinking about using the services of a shared hosting provider, you might also want to find out what other sites are hosted on their servers. If you share a server with a site engaging in spamming activities, you might find out that their infamy can rub off on you, getting you blacklisted as well, with no fault of your own.

Technical support and estimated downtime are also high on the list of things that you need to know before signing a contract. Instances in which the only way to fix a problem is to contact the provider’s technical support are all too common, so you want them to be readily available in emergencies, and capable of helping you with any kind of issue that might crop up. Online reviews are a good way to get the general idea on a host, but if they are offering one, you might also want to consider making use of
the trial period that most providers use to attract new customers.

Make Sure to Avoid Free Hosting Offers:

There are a lot of providers offering free hosting, however, there are still not too many cases of a customer satisfied with this kind of service. Pretty much the only ones who are able to really make use of such offers are spammers who don’t care about the fact that the host is free to post ads all over your website, steal your content, provide you with ridiculously low amount of resources and generally, help you get exactly what you paid for.

source: http://www.crucial.com.au