What to look out for with dedicated hosting
Every website on the Internet needs server hosting because it needs to be somewhere for all the content to be stored so that is visible on the World Wide Web. Now there are several types of hosting plans you can buy but it really doesn't matter which one you choose when you simply want a web presence.
However some hosting plans are a lot better than others and about the best type of hosting you can buy is dedicated server hosting as it offers you a huge amount of bandwidth and web space for your websites and it's not affected by any other hosting accounts.
Now as with everything when it comes to having the best you end up paying a price to match so it's not really affordable for a lot of people and in reality it's really not needed unless you have a huge amount of content and traffic to match. This might be the case if you really have a successful website but are planning on expanding the content and the promotion but through a different server hosting provider. So let's say you decide to get dedicated hosting, you might be asking yourself what you need to look at to determine which is the better dedicated server provider.
Now unlike shared hosting there will be limits to each of the parameters you need to look at but this isn't a problem because you will be the only person on that specific server. When you are researching take note of how much disk space each server hosting company provides along with the amount of bandwidth they are offering. Also look to see what percentage their uptime and downtime is. The best you can hope for is to find a company that offers 100% uptime with zero downtime but something close to that is good. For example a server hosting company offering 99.9% uptime will usually have your website not visible for about an hour a month which isn't bad.
Also look for 24 hour technical support as a hosting plan is only as good as the support behind it. No matter how experienced you are you will always need technical assistance at some time or other so it's important to have great support and any time you need it.
Definitely rule out hosting companies that don't offer fully managed servers unless you happen to be an I.T specialist who knows all about server side maintenance. It's just not worth the hassle of having to manage your own server or worse still, hiring someone to manage it for you. You may as well have the hosting company manage the whole thing so you can concentrate on your core business rather than having to waste time messing around with maintenance.
If you are switching hosting providers check to see if there is a charge for such a thing. So sites do while others of free transfer.
Also check to see how many databases they offer as you will need a database for different software applications, the most common being WordPress. You may be able to setup lots of website but without a good number of databases you're going to struggle when it comes time to adding WordPress.
Most dedicated server accounts offer unlimited email accounts but dedicated ip's is a different story. Check to see how many ip addresses you can have as this will help if you want to add a little independance between websites.
Apart from all that many server hosting companies like www.serverspace.co.uk offer a range of different software applications which work in conjunction with the cpanel interface. If you're a complete novice you will want some form of website builder so lookout for that, although I wouldn't recommend you go for dedicated hosting if you are new to all this.
Your best bet to make sure you know exactly what you are getting is to ask to contact the hosting company's support as they should be more than happy to assist. This also helps you see how responsive their support is so you can kill two birds with one stone which should make it much easier to narrow down the hosting company which is just right for your needs.