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Choosing the right Website Hosting Company |
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While it's possible to serve up your own website to the world, you'll most likely want to hire a web hosting company to do it for you. A web hosting
company has a bank of computers that are always on and ready to go. In addition, professional administrators are on hand to configure and maintain these
'servers' to keep them in top working condition and safe from malitious attacks. There are several points you should consider when choosing a website
hosting company:
 Reliability
Customer Service
Applications
Email
Disk Space and Bandwidth
Stability and Longevity
We use
GoDaddy
 for all of our website hosting (currently more than 30 websites). GoDaddy offers it's
Hosting Packages
at prices up to 70% less than the competition. They are the sole
developer and proprietor of their technology, do not license any products from others and do not outsource or offshore any of their operations. This enables
them to provide better support and ensure the most advanced and competitively-priced products and services available today.
 Reliability: Most hosting companies offer uptime reliability of around 95%. GoDaddy guarantees uptime of 99.9% making them the most reliable
hosting company in the industry! Uptime refers to the time your website is visible on the internet and is the main reason to have a hosting company v.
hosting yourself. In all our time dealing with GoDaddy, we are unaware of any outages whatsoever.
Customer Service: Getting help with your website is just as important as reliability. With more than 30 websites, we've had plenty of opportunities
to test GoDaddys customer service and we've taken total advantage of them. You can contact GoDaddy either by mail or by phone. Wait times by phone usually
run 5 minutes or so which is great compared with some of the other hosting companies we've dealt with. You can expect a response by email within 6 or 8 hours
instead of days with the other guys (if you get a response at all). The reps are always polite and knowledgable and have no problem escalating your question
up the chain.
Applications: Depending on what kind of site you intend to build you may require certain applications.
Features such as blogs, chat, forums, social networking, eCommerce and MySql databases require specialized software and server configurations. GoDaddy
has a slew of mostly free applications and customer service will install and configure these for basic operation. GoDaddy also makes available great turnkey
Website builders, Quick Shopping CartŪ, (if you want an online store) Quick Blogcast (for blogging & podcasting) and Site Analytics for an extra fee (We use
Free Analytics from Google). You can see the full list of avaliable applications at
GoDaddys Hosting Connection
 .
Email: Even the most basic websites will need to be associated with an email address for contact
purposes. GoDaddys economy web hosting plan comes with 100 hosted email accounts. If you're a single man operation you'll likely need no more than 2 or 3.
Disk Space and Storage: For $2 more per month, you should definately upgrade to the 'Deluxe Plan' This
will give you 150GB of File Space and 1.5TB of Bandwidth... enough to carry most any startup through it's first year. If you're like me and want to develop
multiple sites, you will want to upgrade to the 'Unlimited' Hosting package. With unlimited disk space and transfer you can grow your business as big as you
like for less than $15 per month. In any case, GoDaddy will give you full credit if you decide to upgrade your hosting plan later.
Stability and Longevity: Hosting companies come... and they go, taking your money with them. GoDaddy
was founded by Bob Parsons in 1997 making them one of the most reliable web hosting companies around. GoDaddy is the industry leader and they're not going
anywhere.
When you sign up for GoDaddy Hosting you'll also have to choose between Linux and Windows OS Platforms. While you may have more experience with
Windows it may be a better option to choose Linux. There are considerably more applications written for the Linux and Apache configuration giving you more
website feature options both free and paid. Your domain name is probably already registered through GoDaddy... especially if you bought a keyword rich
domain name from us. Take advantage of GoDaddys integrated Services Environment with both nameservers and applications available for a specific domain
from a central 'dashboard' interface. Honestly, there's nothing else like it at any other web hosting company.
We really can't tell you enough about GoDaddys Best-in-industry live customer support, 24 / 7. I'm sure we've contected them by mail and phone
more than 100 times and we always get our question answered or problem resolved. GoDaddys customer service reps are knowledgable and effecient so they don't
waste a lot of your time. Lastly, they are graded internally by short customer surveys after most calls so you have the opportunity to give some feedback to
their bosses if you like. When it comes to breaking down barriers you can't beat a call to GoDaddy customer service.
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