If you love beauty and fashion and you are considering sharing your knowledge and skills in the World Wide Web then the easiest way to start is opening a Facebook page or a YouTube channel. However, if you feel you wish to have your very own home online then a blog is a good place to start. Most online startups in beauty pick up a blog theme from WordPress. It is very common for beginners to get free hosting in WordPress too. However, once your blog expands you will be looking for flexible solutions with one of the very many webhosting providers. The purpose of this article is to make it simple for all you fashionistas and beauty enthusiasts understand some technical things when picking your online home.
It is good to shop around for the good offers. Generally speaking, there is shared hosting and dedicate hosting. When hosting a new beauty blog, shared hosting will in most cases prove to be more than adequate for your needs. With that in mind, you should know what’s important as you choose your webhosting provider. It is easy to make the wrong call, cause yourself a lot of stress and ruin all the fun of owning and managing a beauty blog.
For the sake of simplicity, this article will give you all the information you need to make the right choice without bombarding you with the complex web hosting jargon you will typically find when looking at similar guides. As you try to get hosting for your blog you might want to keep the following facts in mind and you evaluate your prospective webhosting companies.
1. Technical Support
It is mostly the rule rather than the exception that your blog will face issues that will need the assistance of your webhost to resolve. The better the technical support you get at these times the more time and energy you will have to give your audience quality content in your chosen field rather than pulling your sleeves up trying to fix the mechanics of your site and being the techie in your own blog.
As a matter of fact, good quality customer support services are so important that any web host is worth passing up on if you see some weaknesses in this area, however good it’s other features are.
But just to be sure, what exactly should you be on the lookout for as you evaluate customer support?
1.1.Round the Clock Availability
If the support is not available 24/7 then it’s not good enough. It can come in form or chat, email, phone support and anything else – but it should be there round the clock.
Some hosts try to cut their costs by offering less and this could cost you in stress and anxiety. For example, the last thing you want is your server to give up and you being left with no help when you run a contest.
1.2.Quality of Support
There are a few ways to determine whether a host’s customer support services are any good besides round-the-clock availability. For instance, you should be curious to know how quickly the support staff can respond to your queries. And when they do, how good are they at resolving your blog issues? It’s even worth going the extra mile to test this for yourself by trying to contact support at times when they are most likely to be offline. For instance, at night or during weekends and holidays.
If these tests leave something to be desired then you should definitely consider other options. It is important that you get relevant support and in a timely manner.
2. Uptime
Another important issue to take into consideration is how often your site will face downtime issues while in the hands of your chosen hosting company. You should gun for the greatest amount of uptime possible (100% uptime if possible). The last thing you want is your fans and followers trying to access your site and getting an error like “server down” or “website cannot be found” on a regular basis, if at all.
3. Cost of the Hosting Services
Although cost should generally take a backseat as far as evaluating shared hosting services goes, it is nonetheless a critical issue to ponder. But as important as it is, you should not start looking for the cheapest hosting plan you can find.
The factors mentioned above have to come first and the hosts that can offer all of them as described can then be evaluated with regard to cost so that you land the most favorable deal. You should know that when paying for these services, quality might vary depending on cost.
So, be very careful to ensure that you get what’s necessary for your hosting needs. If your beauty blog has really grown in size and needs more features than a start-up then you cannot expect to get satisfactory hosting under a free hosting plan. As I always say, in the online world free services are worth every penny.
This article was offered courtesy of Webhostingology, a New York company founded by Alex Papaconstantinou, an expert in cloud computing and webhosting.