When it comes to selecting hosting for a website, there are 4 main things to consider:

1. Location – Deciding where to host a website is important for many reasons. The most important being the amount of time it takes to load a website. When it comes to deciding where, it makes most sense to host your website in the same country as your target audience as this results in the fastest load speeds of the website as well as maximizing visitor access to the website. A good example of this involves a website, which targets South African Internet users. In South Africa, ISPs (Internet Service Providers) split bandwidth up into two brackets: local and international. Local bandwidth is far cheaper and far easier to acquire than international bandwidth. Many ISPs offer free local bandwidth to users once they’ve used up their international bandwidth, this means that if the website is hosted in South Africa, these users will still be able to view the website even once their international bandwidth has been used up.

2. Cost – Hosting can become very expensive if a website is large and has a lot of people visiting it. Hosting accounts are normally charged for data usage, meaning that each time a visitor loads a website, the owner of the website will be charged for sending data from the website to the visitor and, as you can imagine, this can get quite expensive depending on the size of your website and the number of visitors. Hosting a website internationally is cheaper, but naturally, as mentioned above, this has a great effect on load speeds and visibility to South Africans, for example.

3. Management – Hosting a website locally gives the administrator (normally your web designer) far more control over the website. When things go wrong, a local phone call can be made in order to sort problems out. When a website is hosted internationally, it often requires a number of emails between the administrator and the company that hosts the website to resolve any technical issues. International hosting that resides in a different time zone to the owner of the website can result in email correspondence drastically delaying the resolution of problems.

4. Software – Before choosing a host, it is critical to determine what the website is going to do. If the website is going to run a corporate blog or an e-commerce shop as opposed to a simple, static website, specific software will be required to run the website. The hosting solution will need to be selected based on the software choice, as not all hosting solutions will run all software requirements. Choosing the incorrect hosting solution for a website will result in a loss of money. An example would be: If you want to run a blog, you would require software which interacts with a database – Most basic hosting packages will not offer a database and you would therefore need a mid-range package. Another important consideration to take into account is whether the software to be run on the website will require a Linux or Windows server. In a fair number of cases, running Linux software on a Windows host will result in problems, and visa versa. This also has an impact on cost as Windows hosting solutions tend to be more expensive than others.

Before purchasing a hosting solution, it is important to consult your web design team. The web design team will be able to look at your requirements and guide you, if not handle the hosting completely themselves and save you the time and potential hassle.