If you plan on modifying and updating your website yourself then FTP access is a requirement. You may also wish to check to make certain that you can create multiple FTP accounts for various people and / or portions of your website. Making individual FTP accounts makes tracking user-created issues less complicated, as well as cutting access to one individual without cutting it for anyone else.
Check to see how many FTP accounts you can create and confirm you will have enough for your wishes. A good control panel can make handling your website hosting account way easier and reduce the requirement for tech support help. Good control panel access will enable you to update, change, set-up, upgrade, downgrade or whatever else you want to do with your account. If I am unable to find a support number on their website–or not provided access to one with the account–is a sure sign that your website host doesn’t want to be prepared with your issues.
If you end up on hold for lengthy amounts of time with each call, that sure is an enormous red flag. You mustn’t get left on hold for at least 4 or five mins before reaching a representative to help. Don’t suggest employing a free website hosting service for anything apart from a past-time site.
The disadvantage to using free hosting is just too much and the barriers, for example forced advertising and long, advanced URLs, are just too great for the benefit you receive. Many firms are bypassing the website hosting providers altogether in favor of hosting their sites on their lonesome in-house servers. There are some definite pros for doing this but I do not advocate going this route unless you’ve got a full time IT person on staff who is talented at website server management. Even with broadband DSL or wire, standard connection speeds are much slower than can be supplied with a quality web host. In-house hosting also doesn’t offer you any sort of uptime guarantee, or, in my experience, quality tech support.
