Helpful Items to Know Before Contacting a Website Hosting Company

SilverServers is a Canadian website hosting company based in Kamloops and located inside the Canshield Data Centre. At SilverServers, we field a lot of questions from new business owners and startups looking to build their first websites, and while we are happy to answer questions and offer support, there are a few things we need to know in order to effectively provide our assistance.

Here are a few things you should know about your future website before phoning a hosting company:

What Resources Do You Require?

Answering the next 4 questions will help us help you figure out what your hosting needs are.

1. What kind of website are you planning to run?

You know your business, but you may not know what type of website is appropriate to fuel that business. Maybe you aren’t even aware that there are different types of websites! That’s okay. We can help you out there. In short, we typically see five main types of business websites, ranging from informational to e-commerce. We break it down in an easy-to-understand format for you in our article, Of The 5 Main Types of Business Websites, Can You Identify Yours? Have a read and find out what category you fit into.

2. How many individual pages might it have? Less than 10? A dozen? A few dozen? Hundreds?

Depending on your business type, you may have given a lot of thought to how many pages your site will require, or you may not have considered this important factor at all. Before contacting a hosting company, you don’t need to know an exact number of pages, but it is important to have a general idea of what you’re looking for. Most business websites have at least five pages – Home, About, Services, Blog/News, Contact. Beyond those, you might be considering a continuously-growing blog or a shop section full of hundreds of products. We want to know what you need so we can offer you enough server resources, so it’s worth giving it some thought before we talk.

3. Is the website highly designed with lots of large images, videos, graphics, and other media? Or is it mostly text-based with a few scattered photos?

Knowing the answers to these questions will help potential web hosts determine what they need in terms of hosting services and server resources.

4. How much traffic do you expect to see?

This is different than asking the question, “How much traffic do you want to see?”. From the beginning, it helps to know approximately how much traffic you expect to see, so that your web host can plan for any spikes in visitors that may occur and avoid any potential delays. Think in terms of visitors per month – will you expect to see dozens, hundreds, thousands, or hundreds of thousands each month?

What Type of Hosting Do You Want?

Here are the options:

• Shared
• Virtual Private Server
• Dedicated Server

Are you unsure what type of hosting will work best? That’s okay. If we know the resources you require (from the four questions above),we'll be able to recommend a hosting type. Some businesses require certain types of hosting for security reasons. It's helpful if you know in advance whether you need something specific. Our servers are all on-location on Canadian soil at the Canshield Data Centre. Find out more about our Hosting Service.

Do You Need Help Building Your Website?

Whether you're bringing a fully functioning website to our servers or you want us to help you build one from scratch, we can help you out! Contact us for more info about custom website design.

Reaching out to set up a website should be an exciting step, but most people who reach out aren't quite prepared for the questions we have to ask, so they get turned away and given homework – which is still progress, but maybe isn't as exciting. We hope the information shared here helps!

Get in touch with us at SilverServers as soon as you have some ideas of what you need. Remember, you don’t have to have all the answers – you just need to know enough of the basics so that we can help you out. Also, watch our blog for more helpful articles about finding a website host!

For more related content and tips, check out the Website Hosting section of our blog!