Choosing the right real estate web hosting company for your website is very important, but it doesn’t have to be difficult.

A quick search for “real estate web hosting” at your search engine of choice will produce anywhere between 34,000 and 63 million matching results.

So how do you narrow it down to one, or two, and then finally choose the web site host that will become the foundation of your real estate business on the web?

How do you make sure you get the caliber of real estate web hosting that you need?

Simple. Read on…

An excellent web host is a combination of four things:

1. Dependability or Uptime
2. Support (technical support AND customer service)
3. Features
4. Price

Let’s address these one at a time. They are all important, just not equally important.

DEPENDABILITY

The single most important feature of any real estate web hosting company is dependability. After all, what good is a web site, and what good can it do your business if it isn’t OPEN for business?

Understand that NO web host is perfect and there will be times when small outages (planned and unplanned) occur.

That said, be sure you select a host that offers uptime of AT LEAST 99%.

It’s simply a necessity.

SUPPORT

With the current popularity of reseller programs (where anyone can sell web hosting and brand it as their own) and the pressure for tech businesses to post a profit, support service has seen a drastic decline.

Hold times for technical support are longer than ever and some real estate web hosting companies have even discontinued phone support.

Emailing tech support and receiving a response in 24-48 hours is NOT the type of web site hosting you want for your real estate business.

No matter which web site hosting service you select, be sure to give their customer service and technical support a test drive BEFORE you sign on the dotted line.

FEATURES

While the feature set of your web site IS important, competition in the web site hosting business is fierce enough that most hosts offer roughly the same set of features for a similar price.

Features like subdomains (yourwebstore.yourdomainname.com), autoresponders, SSL (which allows you to process e-commerce transactions SECURELY), and MySQL (popular database for making your web site dynamic) are almost always included in the business web site hosting packages offered by reputable hosting companies.

PRICE

Of all of the factors that you consider when choosing web site hosting, price should be the very, very LAST ONE.

Like we said before, competition is fierce in the real estate web hosting world. Simply put, you aren’t going to find enough of a difference in price to support choosing one host over another.

Too many other factors, that are MUCH more important to your business, should be considered first.

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Bottom line for choosing real estate web hosting company:

Forget price

Don’t pay too much attention to features

DEMAND dependability

Test the technical support BEFORE you need it.

Jason Leister is owner of Computer Super Guy, LLC, a Chicago-based technology firm that helps real estate professionals profit with technology.

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