Introduction To Personal Web Hosting

Thursday, 26 November 2009

If you are thinking of putting a web page online whether it be for personal reasons such as a profile for yourself, your family, an interest or simply an internet brochure for your small business, then you should go for personal web hosting as a solution.  The specifications of your site will not entail the features and the costs of business web hosting anyway.

This does not mean however that you get low quality hosting because personal web hosting costs so much less.  It just means that a lot of CPU and storage prices have already gone down making it more affordable for you to serve the needs of a small to medium sized business even with a personal web hosting plan.  To be technical about it, there are only 2 major differences in web hosting – the shared and dedicated web hosting.  The latter means that you rent your own server from a large web hosting company.  So you shouldn’t bother yourself with comparing personal web hosting from business web hosting.

Web Hosting for Beginners

As a beginner web master, the biggest challenge you will encounter when running your personal web hosting is that you will have minimal technical support as compared to business plans out there.  Some of the business plans have a 24 hour technical support available to them  But there are forums, blogs and search engines available on the internet that you can refer to if and when you encounter some of your first questions and difficulties.  You are not likely to run into complicated and challenging problems anyway as a beginner.

There is a major advantage to using personal web hosting aside from its affordability.  Usually, website building interface including website templates which are designed and created specifically for small businesses are offered by most if not all personal hosting companies.  They make it very easy and convenient for you to change the look and feel of your site simply by clicking a button on a particular web form.  Most of the time, content management, a range of pictures and user navigation such as menus on the right, top or left, are included in these templates.  This convenience and efficient way to alter your site makes it a no brainer for most people to choose personal web hosting plans over business plans even if at times the rates are the same.  You should carefully assess your requirements before choosing the plan that you need.  Because with computers,  your decision should not always be a comparison of price but rather of features.  That is why it is important to make sure you know what your needs are first.

Lastly, take the time to do a market research before you proceed with buying a personal web hosting plan.  Go for one that has a proven track record.  Once you choose to use an in-house website builder of a hosting company, it will be close to impossible for you to transfer your site to a different provider in the future should you feel dissatisfied with them.