In a world where there are hundreds upon hundreds of different companies offering web hosting, it’s often difficult knowing which one to use and which to avoid.
There are lots of top-quality web hosting companies out there that offer top-notch services and will do everything possible to provide nothing but high-performance hosting for your website.
1. Avoid Cheap Hosting Options
When it comes to web hosting, you need to remember the old saying, “you get what you pay for”. If you sign up with a $1 a month host, don’t sit back and expect that everything is going to work perfectly. There is a huge difference as to why some companies charge $1 a month and others $15 for relatively the same thing.
For a start, most cheap hosting companies are certainly overselling the resources on their servers. This means that there could potentially be thousands of customers hosting accounts on a single server. At some point, the server is simply not going to be able to cope. Next, you’ll experience issues such as downtime when your website goes offline.
Problems with Cheap Hosting
You’ll also discover a lot of people who are engaged in somewhat illegal activities use cheap servers. For example, websites that pirate movies, music, and software often use cheap hosting services. Finally, when they are removed from the server for such activities. They simply sign up with another and carry on for as long as they can.
These actually create what is known as bad neighborhoods on the internet, and you certainly don’t want the website for your honest, legitimate business to be hosted on the same server as some of these other websites.
Another common problem with such hosting is that it is prone to hacks and being abused. Sometimes spammers will sign up with a bunch of cheap hosts, and send out masses of spam before being detected and removed from the server. This could cause the IP of the server to be blocked for spamming, which could result in a problem with your own emails being sent or received properly.
2. Look for a Quality Host
You will want to have your website hosted with a company that provides a quality service, and one with high-performance levels. Check out 28msec’s hosting reviews if you are interested in learning about some of the best web hosts to use.
Most good web hosts will never oversell their servers, and even with their cheapest hosting options, which will be shared hosting, they are much more controlled and limited in the number of users, and the resources being allocated.
You won’t experience the same type of problems that you may do with a $1 host, but of course, problems with servers can arise all the time, and any server is prone to having an off day. The thing that makes the difference is how quickly the issue is resolved. Most web hosts will work to fix any server issues the second they are discovered, and a lot of the time, you will be completely unaware that there were any problems in the first place.
3. Choose a Hosting Provider with a Wide Range of Services
A good host will have a choice of different hosting. The main types that you should find with all good web hosts will be shared hosting, VPS (virtual private server), and dedicated servers. There are also some hosts that offer other types of hosting packages, such as WordPress hosting, which is where the servers are specifically set up to provide the best performance to websites built with WordPress, which is the world’s most popular content management system (CMS).
It’s also a good idea to speak to the host about possible account upgrades in the future. You’ll want to be sure that if you need to upgrade your account as you are reaching the limit of resources in the current package, that this is something that can be done quickly and without any disruption to your website.
If you come across a web host that only offers a single hosting option, then it’s more than likely that they are not a really serious company, and that this could just be a part-time business for an individual to earn a little extra income. Apart from all this you should look for a web host who can provide you dedicated support for your hosting queries and other complex IT tasks such as SharePoint Online Tenant to Tenant Migration or Gmail to Exchange Migration, etc.
4. Quality Security & Data Protection
A good web host will offer a very high level of protection and security for their hosting options. Check out potential hosts and see what type of security they provide.
Do they offer daily/weekly backups? Are these done automatically, or are they something that you need to take care of? Are they offering the latest versions of PHP and MySQL, or at least offering you the choice of selecting which version you want to use?
Most web hosts will take security very seriously and should have a number of things in place to make sure that their servers and data centers are protected against various forms of attack, and that they have options in place to deal with any such events taking place.
5. Good Customer Support Goes a Long Way
Web hosting is not the same as rocket science, but for those who are new to it, it is something that can be a little daunting. At the beginning, you are bound to have a few questions or need help in setting something up, so you will want to make sure that the host you work with is responsive to client support requests.
Whether they operate a 24/7 live chat support or simply a basic ticket system, the important thing is how quickly they respond and how quickly they are able to help with the problem.
Sometimes the issue might be something like a misconfigured email account, which can be fixed in seconds. Other times it might be an internal server issue which could take some time to deal with. However, as long as all problems are acknowledged and dealt with in a timely manner, it doesn’t really matter what type of support system they are using.
Some Final Thoughts
When it comes to finding a good web host for your site, it’s important that you take a little time out and compare different web hosts. Most will be offering the same type of hosting accounts with similar features, but there might be a big difference in their prices.
Though pricing is always a factor with everything we buy, when it comes to web hosting, cheap is not always the best option, and it’s worth spending a few dollars more each month for a much more reliable service, then simply going with the cheapest option you can find.