Who should you host your holiday property website with?
If you’ve been following this series, you’ll have already chosen a great name for your property, picked and registered the perfect domain for it and decided which country it’s going to be hosted in. Now, the question is which company you should use to to the hosting?
You could go down the route of choosing those that advertise most as many people do. That’s not always the best choice although, to be fair, it’s not always the worst either. However, let’s consider what you should be looking for.
If you’ve registered more than one domain as we suggested earlier then you should look for hosting services that offer free add-on domains. What that means is that they will let you host more than one domain within the same hosting account which 1) saves you money if you have more than one domain and 2) let’s you carry out some very useful tricks that we’ll get to in due course.
Hosting services always boast how much webspace that they give you but in reality your property website will almost certainly only require the smallest hosting package on offer. After all, you’re not going to be hosting hundreds of photographs nor video and those are what eat up webspace. Neither will you require a lot of bandwidth. These two aspects (webspace and bandwidth) are what usually determine the package that you require and, for a property website, you’ll not need much of either.
What about e-mail accounts? As a rule you should always use your domain for e-mail ie use something like bookings @ selfcateringnormandyonline.com rather than fastlady99 @ hotmail.com as it comes across as being more professional. Most hosting services will offer you a number of mailboxes but in practical terms it’s often simpler to use their mail redirection services (I’ll be covering these aspects later). At any rate, you don’t need lots of mailboxes or forwards.
One thing that you might need is MySQL although it’s unlikely that you’d need it initially if you’re developing your own website. If you’re having your website written for you, ask the developer what features you will need to have available. Do NOT get them to host the website for you! This can severely limit your ability to make changes to the site and may effectively tie you to the developer which is not good.
If you are developing your website yourself, you might think that you need a hosting service with a lot of templates that you can use. Not so. If you select them on that basis you’ll be tied to them whereas if you choose some decent website design software, you can use any hosting service and will usually have templates within the software anyway.
It’s useful, but not essential, to have a hosting service that uses cpanel which is a standard piece of software used to control your hosting account. This lets you make a lot of changes to the account yourself which means that you don’t need to worry about how long the support service will take to do something for you.
You should be able to use that information to select a great hosting service for your site. However, if you’re like me you’re probably thinking that I’ve already gone through all of that already and presumably I’ve already picked the perfect host. That’s true but it might not be the perfect host for you. However, rather than weasle out of it, I host with two services which are eukhost.com in the UK and hostgator.com in America. Why those two?
I went through the selection criteria as above but with the addition that I did need a reasonable amount of bandwidth for the listings sites. Add-on domains are essential for me but fairly rare in the UK; eukhost.com is one of the relatively places that offer them and for £23 their base package is very good value. Similar reasoning brought me to hostgator.com although their base package at $5/month doesn’t offer add-on domains and I use the next one up at $10/month. So far, I’ve been very happy with both of them.
Finally, before you head off into the sunset, one question worth asking is: do you need a website at all? Frankly, I’m in two minds about that. On the one hand, “everyone” has one so presumably you should too. In a sense that’s right but bear in mind that it won’t be your own website that brings you the initial bookings: it’ll be sites that you’re listed on. So, short-term, you probably don’t need a website but in the longer term it’s probably worth having one on the basis that bookings made via that are more profitable for you and as time goes on your site will be seen by more people. Remember too that some listings will generate quite a good website for you anyway, for example, our very own listing site generates an entry for you comparable to many specially written sites.
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