Meet hosting choice difficulty? There are so many web hosting service providers you can choose from when you are looking for a web host to start your website. Like a saying goes “The difficulty in life is the choice”, we can understand the trouble in finding a quality web host and the right hosting package.
What should be your criteria for selecting a reliable web host? How to decide which hosting plan is most suited for your website? Finding a good web host is like finding a good domain name. There are some criteria and tips on choosing a web host you need to follow.
How to Choose a Web Host and Find the Best Web Hosting?
Your very own website requirements
The first thing is to focus on what you really need other than what you can get from all kinds of web hosting solutions. Write down the purpose of your website and make a list of all the requirements to fulfill the purpose. What kind of website do you have or are you going to create? For example, blogger may want to create a blog using WordPress, business owners may want a online shopping cart store and hosting, you may like to set up a discussion forum for your organization, club, group, users. Is it a new website to start from scratch or an existing website with large traffic already? What kind of technology of your website, a PHP script, .Net, or simply HTML website? Any database and what type of database your site would be driven by? Will you need any special script on the server in order to run your website smoothly?
Adequate Space and Bandwidth
The server and bandwidth resources are very important to ensure your website can be functional? You have to allocate enough web server disk space and database (if required) quota to host your website files and data. You also need to acquire adequate bandwidth allocation to your website so your website visitors can access your website from internet quickly. Building a fully functional and fast website is very important to the success of your online business, thus we recommend beginners to get started from a quality shared unlimited web hosting.
Great Server Reliability
This is the issue most website owners and web masters care about a lot. Since your website is online and running all the time, you have to find a reliable web host with minimum downtime. A good web host can guarantee web server uptime as high as 99.9%. Web hosting server reliability is not merely about the uptime, but also fast access speed, high level of server and data security, instant server backup and so on.
Good Hosting Price
There are many web hosting solutions with different prices and rates. When we say good price, it does not have to be the cheaper the better. Various hosting server types and hosting solutions are priced differently from each other. The shared web hosting is the cheapest, dedicated servers are the most expensive hosting solution, while the VPS (virtual private server) solution requires medium expenses. You can find a cheap hosting service here.
Normally you can get a shared hosting for personal websites, small to medium websites. The unlimited web hosting is the best choice. For medium to large business websites with large traffic and lots of visits, you should consider VPS or dedicated server. You can always start from small, get a shared hosting first, and upgrade to a higher hosting solution when your website gets very popular.
Fast and Professional Customer Support
Support is very crucial with any web hosting. A lot of technical issues might happen, covering website scripts, database, internet connection, name servers, emails, malware, security and more. Most of the time, you do not need to worry about these issues, your website developer will fix the script issues of the website, your web host will fix the issue on the server side. But in case any unknown issue happens and you do not have very strong technical background, the technical support from your web hosting provider can be of upmost importance. Many good web hosting service providers now can offer tech and billing support through phone calls, live chat and ticket support, like Bluehost, Arvixe hosting, Justhost, etc. When you choose a web host, always find one who can offer fast customer support 24*7*360 via multiple channels. Note that not all technical support items are included in the hosting package for free. Contact your web host for the details.
The above tips and criteria on selecting web host can help you get the right web host and an appropriate hosting plan. However these should not be all the aspects that might affect your purchase. Under some circumstance, you may also need to consider other aspects such as payment types, server locations, etc. Which hosting service are you using? Why do you choose to host your website with them? Share with us in the comment below.
I couldn’t agree more when you mentioned choosing a web hosting provider that provides great server reliability. This means getting a provider that can be relied on for its security and fast access speed. Also, you may want to consider if they have minimum downtime as you certainly don’t want your business or work to be put to a halt. If I were to choose a web host provider, I would make sure to take this into account. Thanks.