7 Quick Tips For Choosing the Right Web Hosting Company
ByChoosing the Right Web Hosting Company
7 Quick Tips For Choosing the Right Web Hosting Company
Choosing the perfect website hosting service can be a bit overwhelming for many new website owners, especially nowadays because there are literally hundreds of web hosting companies offering many different hosting packages. Below I will point out some of the must have features of a good hosting plan you should look for before signing up for any hosting service.
Web Hosting Cost
Whether you plan to build just one website or many the hosting cost should fall somewhere between $5 – $12 per month. Typically you can save more money if you select to pay the full year in advance. To receive additional discounts you may also have the option to prepay for the service for two or more years. The longer the hosting service duration, the lower the overall monthly cost.
Web Hosting Control Panel (cPanel)
Most popular web hosting providers include cPanel as their web hosting control panel. cPanel helps users to manage their domains through an online interface. It gives users the ability to configure and manage their websites, set up multiple email accounts, create and edit databases, set up and manage sub-domain names, ftp access and more. cPanel normally comes with a commercial script library called Fantastico. With Fantastico you have access to numerous scripts for installation such as WordPress, support desk, forums and shopping carts to name a few. Cpanel is also the most popular and widely used control panel throughout the hosting industry.
Ability to Host Multiple Domains
If you plan on hosting more than one domain name on your account then you must make certain that the hosting company allows multiple domain hosting. Most popular hosting providers offer unlimited domain hosting which allows you to host as many websites as you like with just one hosting account.
Monthly Bandwidth
Your monthly bandwidth is added up each time a visitor accesses data from your website. Being that bandwidth is the biggest culprit of hosting costs, you want to check the limits placed on each hosting plan to see if it fits your websites criteria. Many hosting companies offer unlimited bandwidth with some of their plans.
Disk Space
In order to store your website files such as pages, graphics and videos you must make certain to obtain adequate disk space for your hosting service. These days you can find numerous hosting companies offering unlimited disk space at reasonable costs.
Hosting Service Reliability
There are many hosting companies that guarantee 99-100% up-time. What this basically means is your website is guaranteed to be live at all times with no interruptions. Typically hosting companies that boast this guarantee normally have backup servers in case of technical issues.
Customer Support
If you should run into any technical issues with your website, having access to 24 hour customer support is essential to your online business. Be sure to choose a hosting provider that offers 24 hour tech support by phone or live chat.
These are a few important features you should look for when purchasing your hosting service.
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I feel you’ve neglected some very important factors for choosing a web hosting company.
I feel that while cost is important—it probably should not be the main consideration when you are searching for a host.
What should be a main consideration is does the host allow you to do what you need to do.
Are you going to be running wordpress? Lots of hosts will let you run WordPress. heck they even have installation scripts for you. But you get a far different experience on each host. Hosting WordPress on GoDaddy can be incredibly SLOW—for some reason running PHP processes grind to a halt on GoDaddy. They have tremendously fast webservers—static HTML to your screen—but anytime you are waiting for php scripts in wordpress to go, well, you’ll notice the slowdown.
Another issue I have with GoDaddy, is how complicated their hosting administration is. You need a manual to try to do ANYTHING at all. It’s very complex and some things are proprietary—they have a “DIY” hosting option, but don’t even plan on moving those pages anywhere else. You can’t. This was mentioned in the article—cPanel being on of the HUGE features you are looking for in a webhost. If it doesn’t have a cPanel, keep looking.
Another thing I think is important is, what sort of Operating System is the host running on. I hate to be Windows biased, but Windows servers are WORSE than GoDaddy servers in their complexity. Don’t think because you have a Windows machine at home that you can figure one of these things out. You can’t. It’s completely different and geared towards making web pages function. The majority of the help out there is for Linux systems. That’s because Windows servers are the minority. WordPress is typically very clunky and awkward on a windows host—it was actually DESIGNED to be used in a Linux environment.
I personally have been with—and worked on—several different hosts.
Nick, thanks for adding to this post. The cost is certainly not the most important part when selecting a web host, it’s just one thing to consider. Also, the 7 tips aren’t in order by importance, but just a list of a few things to keep in mind.