If you have invested your time and money to design a website, your site must always be available to those who are looking for your website. There are several companies on the internet that offer web hosting services, some of them even free. The companies, who offer web hosting services free, usually run advertisements on your website. If you would like your newly designed website to look professional and highly available, you must choose a reliable company that provides web hosting services for a fee. Our discussions are related to hosting a web site, you have custom designed and developed, with a third party web hosting services provider.

There are two kinds of hosting services available with hosting service providers. One that uses a dedicated server for your website and another that uses the same server for a number of websites. The first one is widely known as dedicated server web hosting and the second is called shared server web hosting. Many professional web hosting and website design companies use a cluster of machines to host a number of websites. In other words, a number of web pages from different websites will simultaneously utilize the resources of a cluster of machines. Virtual Dedicated Server Hosting slices up a server into virtual servers and each domain gets their own slice of the server. Each user feels like they use a dedicated server, however, they are sharing the server resources with other users.

There are certain important factors that you need to evaluate before making a decision to use a third party dedicated server web hosting or shared server web hosting. Dedicated server hosting services are more expensive than using shared services on a single web server or on a cluster of machines.

Dedicated Server Web Hosting Vs Shared services Web Hosting

There are definite advantages to choose a dedicated server for web hosting service needs. Dedicated server uses its memory, hardware and bandwidth only for your website and thus is always available for the transactions for your website. If the traffic and other business reasons for your website do not justify a dedicated environment, you can consider a shared hosting environment.

If you choose to host your website in a shared environment, an important point to consider is the resource competition among various websites stored on the same server. When you share the server with other websites that have heavy cyclical traffic, the performance of your site may be affected periodically.

Today, there are advanced applications available to be implemented in addition to the conventional infrastructure used by hosting service providers. Advanced hosting solutions use simulation models to compare the range of different workloads. Thus it is important to know whom you choose to host with. If your site happens to be in a bad neighborhood of less desirable sites, there is a chance that companies providing search solutions on the web may potentially group you in the same class.

Other considerations for good hosting services

If your website has considerable cyclical traffic you must ensure that your web hosting provider has efficient load balancing and memory usage solutions before you choose to host your website with several other sites. Your provider’s shared hosting solutions must allocate the websites to different machines in the cluster based on their traffic characteristics. Such allocation can avoid the redundant document replication and thus improve the effective performance of the hosting system.

It is important to evaluate the connectivity, redundancy and monitoring capabilities of your web hosting services whether you choose dedicated server web hosting or shared server web hosting. Web hosting services must have a policy to keep your data backed up periodically. Order and credit card transactional data on web hosting servers for ecommerce businesses must be backed up more frequently.

There are some low-end hosting companies that run advertisements on your web pages. So if you choose to host in a shared server environment, you should enquire whether the hosting company will run advertisements on your web pages.

Many web hosting companies oversell their services because most websites do not use significant portion of their allocated share. The term overselling is used in the web hosting industry to illustrate circumstances in which a company offers hosting plans that are way over the resources allocated individually to each website’s hosting needs. If every one of company’s customers uses the bandwidth of services promised to them the resource infrastructure will be overburdened. The overburdening is usually in the bandwidth transfer allowance and space utilization.

If you use hosting services that oversells, for a high-traffic business website, the performance can be periodically affected. A dedicated server or a virtual private server is a preferred option for thus customers.

Web Site Design Resources

There are a number of web site design resources that you can read on our web site. Small Business Web Site Design Services page article focus on the aspects of developing a functional design for a small business website. Advantages and disadvantages of a Flash-enabled website are enumerated on Flash Website Design Services section. The key determinants for designing an effective eCommerce Website are detailed on our eCommerce Web Development Services section. You can read more about our services for designing a tailor-made website solution, on our Custom Website Design Services section. Strategies on designing a website that facilitates intuitive retrieval of information are outlined in Graphic Website Design Services section. The same section has information about optimizing the page loading speed by using appropriate amount of graphics.

Our ‘How to design your website’ guide has general guidelines on constructing a website that is easily usable by your customers. Strategies to effectively market your website for developing a successful web-based business are outlined in Website Promotion and Internet Marketing section.