How to Choose the Best Web Hosting
Online, June 8, 2014 (Newswire.com) - There are new web hosting providers entering market every day. Having such a great choice is definitely a good thing, but such an abundance of different providers canoften make it really hard to actually make a decision and pick one best webhosting. Web is flooded with "top 5", "top 10", and similar web hosting comparisons; however, in this article, we will give you something much more valuable than that - we will teach you how to analyze providers yourself and choose the one that suits your needs and budget best. That is by far the best way of choosing the right provider. Here are the main factors you should consider:
• Features: The best web hosting companies are often well-known for the variety of different feature they are offering to their clients. You should check those features with with every provider, but it is the most important to define what features are important for your website, and choose your top web hosting provider accordingly.
• Uptime: It is a percentage of time while the server where your website is hosted is actually up and running. It is normal to have certain downtime, even the best web hosting companies experience that from time to time. A great uptime would be any result above 99.5%. Again, it is very important to know what kind of service you need for your website. If you are running high-traffic website, especially an e-commerce, where every second of downtime might cause you to lose money, you need to choose only the web hosting providers that offer very high uptime. If you are running something less serious, such as personal blog you do for hobby, then this isn't of such a great importance.
• Support: Just as with the uptime issue, the importance of having a good support depends on the type of website you are running. If you are running blog where you publish occasional post for fun, it is not a big deal to wait for 48 hours for the response after your site encounters some trouble. On the other hand, if you are running an online shop, every hour of waiting for the support to fix your problem will be a direct financial loss for you. So once again, make the web hosting comparison accordingly. Good way to test their support is to send them a ticket before making a purchase. If they wait 24 hours to reply to a potential customer, then how eager to help you expect them to be later on, after they take your money? This isn't any guarantee, but it couldn't hurt to take this little test.
• Price: This is the trickiest question of them all. It combines all previous factors, plus your budget limitations comes into play as well. You should make a good analysis before deciding which one is the top web hosting for you. There is plenty of very cheap web hosting providers. However, there are at least two things you should be aware of when you consider paying for their services. First is to take a good look of their complete pricing plan. I am not saying it is always so, but in many cases, when someone is offering you hosting "for free" or "for $1 per month", very often the free or $1 cost applies only to your first month. After that, you will be charged on a monthly basis for a price that is just an average of the market, or often much higher than that; so be careful with these "free" and "cheap" offers. The other problem is quite understandable - you cannot pay two or three times less than 90% of other customers do, and then expect 99.9% uptime, 24/7 support, and all other advantages. So if you are running a high-traffic serious website, you should put quality before the price. On the other hand, if you have a personal blog that you run as a hobby, it would be a waste of money to buy some "premium", "ultimate", and other pricey plans. You should make a decision according to your own needs.
With hundreds of web hosting companies offering all kinds of hosting plans, it has become challenging to find balance between price, features, performance and support. Find a good web host that can put it all on the web for you, give you the tools, bandwidth, and storage you need, and support you when you need help.