Choosing a best web hosting service provider could be a difficult task however which web hosting company to select for your website would be highly beneficial. We have already explained about what a web hosting means in our previous article, so if you are not aware of the term “web hosting” we would highly recommend reading our previous article first and then return to this for more information.
Web hosting companies should provide a good range features essential for a website building and hosting. We should check each feature offered and compare them to see if they match your needs. We have listed few features you might like to consider before buying web hosting for your website.
Information for the site
The first and important factor for choosing a web hosting service provider is defining the requirements of your sites and from your hosting service provider. There are many examples. For sites like a social network, it is better to have a total unlimited bandwidth and disc space. This is also good to have a hosting provider which provides unlimited database. There are few questions you need to ask yourself like:
- How much visitors or traffic are you expecting for your site?
- What are your estimates of traffic source from different countries?
- Do you plan different stages of your site over the time?
Finding solution to these questions will help less down your search for the best suited web hosting provider.
For a file hosting website, the hosting provider should be able to give easy upgrade option and true unlimited hosting space. Determining the nature and requirement of your site will help you to choose the right pricing of web hosting plans. This point also will help you to avoid any overpricing or under funding or of your hosting package.
Price
Fee of web hosting is one of the most important factors to be considered before making a final decision. Deciding a fee, you are willing to pay before looking for a hosting service provider would help you and it will also be time efficient. If you come across a web host which does not fits in your budget, then you can simply move to another one without wasting much of your time and efforts.
Most of the hosting companies are offering one click plan upgrade, so anytime if you need more bandwidth, space and resources, you can always upgrade to a higher plan. For a newly build website we would suggest going for a shared hosting and upgrade a plan later, to dedicated or collocated according to your website needs.
Disk Storage
You should always give preference to a web host that provides you with appropriate amount of disk storage. After storage, bandwidth is another important factor that should not be skipped. You need to evaluate your disk space and bandwidth needs. If your website contains lots of graphics, dozens of pages, and generate a large amount of traffic, you would require a decent bandwidth and disk space.
If you are building a business website, then your primary objective would be to attract as many traffic as possible and for that you would require appropriate amount of bandwidth and storage space. So keeping your website requirement in mind, consider both disk storage and bandwidth carefully before going for a web host.
The Speed of Your Web Host
Everyone wants their website to be fast. A slow site that takes forever to load is always a turn-off. The speed of your website depends on the web hosting service. A simple way to select a web host that gives excellent speed is to track a few past surveys that are regularly conducted to test the fastest web hosting service. Select a provider which has consistently topped the list.
Website performance
To perform and work well, your website will need a fast connection to the internet. The speed of internet will depend on the available bandwidth. If the connection is not fast enough, users will only be able to access your webpages slowly. This can create problems if many visitors are trying to access your site at the same time. Many external hosting services refer to this as the ‘backbone’ – the speed of connection into their servers.
Space Limitation
This is also an area of specification you must consider seriously. If you are planning for a normal site, like for some blog or personal website then limited space providing hosting will be fine. But if you are planning for a site deals with E-commerce, video uploading or gaming and downloading site then you must consider your hosting limitation, such as web space, RAM, disc space, Processing capacity, band-witch, E-mail space, language support and control panel type.
Area of Focus / Specialities
It’s a fact that not all web hosts are right for all different kinds of clients. Some offer good shared plans but don’t have solutions that are good for emerging businesses, while others have great business solutions but aren’t the right fit for someone with a small recipe blog. Look into a business’s specialty or area of expertise before you buy, and go with one that understands your particular needs as clients. You can look for reviews and recommendations on the Web, and many of these will talk about a particular company’s strengths and weaknesses.
Customer / Technical Support
According to most of the populaces, this is the most important service factor you need for Web Hosting. In these day’s hosting technologies is more progressive than the previous hosting technology, but still, if your site goes down for some unidentified reason you must seek for technical support. It doesn’t matter how technically sound and good you are, but when you are hosting your site on a remote server, you will require tech support at one point of time. So before you go to any hosting provider make sure that the hosting provider is having a 24x7x365 support service. Now, many webhosting companies in the sector, gives excellent clients care service and provide various way to connect like Live chat, phone, Email, Twitter and this makes their support outstanding.
Add-Ons
This is the features that make your hosting provider stand out from the others. Add-ons will make any hosting service special and worth of money. With the help of Add-Ons, you can give a magical touch to your site instantly with less effort. Do they offer credits for advertising with Google Ads and Yahoo!? Do they have multiple data centers and offer regular data backups? Most of the service providers are not providing this service. If you find this on your web hosting service with minimum rates then it will be a good sign for your website and hosting.
User-Friendliness
A web host has to give easy-to-handle services to its users. Every individual or organization should focus on the user-friendliness of its control panel. In the long run, using a web hosting service that is too complicated to operate will be a pain. It’s better to take a trial session with a few service providers before you finally settle on the right one. The choice of a good web host is very, very important for your website. Further performance of your website will widely depend on this.
Server Reliability, Up-time Scores and Security
Weak servers and insecure network connections can put your site offline. This not only effect your viewership or sales for an e-commerce store but also leads to low rankings on search engines like Google and Yahoo. Banking on a hosting company with sound uptime scores, preferably above 99.5 percent is, therefore, key to your site’s success. Avoid firms that report an annual uptime score below 99 percent.
Also, to making sure your business site and data are accessible at all times, it’s also essential to make sure you have a trusted and secure hosting solution as well.
Availability of Site Backups
The whole cyber world is full of threats like ransom ware. It has seen an increased number of general websites being targeted by these online extortionists. Such acts often result in irreparable damages like the destruction or replacement of your site’s index.php file. Also, you might also experience severe server or local hard disk failures. So it is very important that you only engage a host service provider that gives regular web data backup.
Ability to Add Domains
Growth comes with diversification. Maybe you are staring with single website and domain name, you will soon realize the need for multiple websites, subdomains and domains in promoting your site. As a result, before going to a particular service provider, consider their different packages, paying keen attention to whether they allow for running of multiple websites on a single web hosting account.
Find out the cost of the unlimited website and subdomain packages and compare it to the rest of industry players. To sum up, take the time to choose a web host that gives many service plans that allows you to add new domains that allow you to scale over time.
Keep in mind, there are many hosting providers in the market however your website shows the reputation of your brand and no one would prefer to go for a hosting plan which would ruin the reputation in front of your customers.
