You want to present your creative idea to the world. You have products and services, and you want to increase its customer base and market.
Definitely for a lot of these similar purposes you need a website.
What are things required to run a website?
Firstly, you need to buy a domain name that will be used to access your website from around the world. After you’ve bought a domain, you need to find out web hosting service providers that could host your website so that your blog or website becomes accessible.
Finally, you need content that will be published on the Website.
You’re done! Isn’t it amazing?
A web hosting server stores your website’s data into their web servers, which is connected to a very fast network. Whenever a user visits a website, the Internet establishes a connection with web servers and transfer information from the web server to the user.
The performance of your website like loading speed, downtime, and maintenance or repair time pretty much depends on the web hosting service provider. Besides fast connection, there are various features that a Web hosting company provides. Nobody likes to visit a website that loads slowly, so choosing a Web Hosting Company is an important decision.
There have been numerous incidents when a website is hacked due to vulnerability on its web server, so if you are concerned about security, you should wisely choose the web hosting provider. So, if you are facing a problem with your current web hosting provider or this is your first website and finding things difficult, you have come to the right place.
This post describes the things to look into a web hosting service provider. It will help you to make a decision on finding a perfect web host for your website.
There are hundreds of Web hosting service providers who will offer you a variety of features, but not all of them suits your need.
The decision on type of hosting server:
Free Hosting: Although free hosting doesn’t cost a single penny, I will recommend you not to opt for free hosting. If your site is hosted by the free server, loading speed will be much slower, and you’ll miss plenty of features provided by the hosting server. Free web servers recover their cost by imposing plenty of advertisements on your website, which will have an adverse effect on your readers. They will also not allow you limited storage, bandwidth, uptime, email storage, applications, etc. for a website.
Related read: Useful guidelines for cheap web hosting solution.
Shared hosting: It is the most economical way to start a website, where you and other website owners share a single dedicated server. It is a very cheap hosting service, as many websites share the same physical server node and software applications.
The speed of your website will be much dependent on other’s website traffic, which shares the server with your website. If it is a popular site then the performance of your site will be tainted, by luck if the other’s site aren’t popular as yours then you can enjoy the fast speed at a very less price of $3 -$5 / month. Still for beginners it let’s get the job done.
VPS hosting: This is a combo of dedicated hosting and shared hosting. In VPS hosting (Virtual Private Server) although you share the server with other websites, you are responsible for the maintenance and performance of your own server.
The overall CPU time and memory are shared by different accounts on the machine; you are always dedicated to a portion of resources always. These allow more control and flexibility like a dedicated server on the cost of little more than shared hosting.
The price of VPS hosting starts from $5 / month.
Dedicated hosting: If you have a very popular site that receives a lot of traffic, then you’ve to switch to dedicated hosting. As you own the entire server alone, all the resource is allocated to you only. This results in very high speed and security of your websites, but it is also very expensive. It is the most favorable server type for an e-Commerce site.
The price of dedicated hosting starts from $100 / month.
Reseller hosting: It is the professional form of hosting where you rent a web server from a hosting company and sell it to your customers at a higher price. You need to install certain software and applications to sell this web server to other websites. If you have spare server space, you can always rent it to others, but you have to ask Web hosting Service provider before renting. This profession is gaining popularity now.
Multiple domain hosting: If you own many websites, then you should look into this feature. Many of the Web hosting providers don’t allow hosting multiple websites at the same price. They will charge you extra money for hosting extra websites, as maintaining Websites cost them. So if you are
Other things to look:
Control panel: If you own websites, there are some things which you need to do it yourself like Installing WordPress, Setting-up FTP accounts, Setting-up Emails, etc.
If they don’t provide cPanel support, you’ll not be able to update and modify these important changes without hosting the company’s help.
Remember, they will also charge you for doing these changes on your website.
Memory allocated: Although companies say they provide you plenty of disk space, it is worthless. It will completely depend on your website content on how much storage you need. On an average, a blog or website with 200 web pages doesn’t consume more than 2 GB of storage, that too with all the necessary software like WordPress. So, before choosing a hosting company, know your requirements of memory so that money is not wasted.
Review: Reading reviews from the previous customer is the best method to get knowledge about the company’s profile. All companies have certain advantages and weakness, it is reflected through reviews. Negative reviews are common, as there has been a practice of demoting others by writing or submitting fake reviews for the sake of gaining their customers, but if the company has too many of these, it is an Alarm!
To check reviews given by experts and customers, type company name +”review” in the search bar of the browser, and you’ll be enlisted many of these reviews on your screen.
I recommend you to check reviews personally so you don’t have to regret later.
Customer support and assistance: Most of the company fails in providing support and assistance to their customer when they needed. It is a very frustrating situation for any website owner. You should check up whether it provides 24×7 technical support to its customer or not? You never know when the thing goes out of your hand!
If the company says so, don’t believe in their words. You can test them by sending an email or ask a question and see how much time they take to respond. Also, check whether they have a technical specialist who can fix your problem or not?
Uptime: Uptime is the time when your site is live on the internet. Surely no-one likes to disappoint a reader who searches for your website and found nothing there. Most of the Hosting servers assure they have more than 99.9% uptime. Any Web Servers with uptime less than 99% should not be acceptable.
You can ask them whether they refund their money if they didn’t deliver promised uptime.
Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the data that your website consumes when readers browse on your website. Most of the Companies claim they provide unlimited bandwidth, but it isn’t true. There is always a certain limit of bandwidth that web hosting provides. If you’ll cross that limit, they will impose an extra charge on you.
Ask the company about the Bandwidth limit and charges for data transfer after the limit.
Security: As I have discussed earlier, many website’s data is compromised due to vulnerability in the hosting server. Always check for security measures they use to keep your website secure and safe. Feel free to ask them the questions:
- How they can recover your site if it is attacked?
- What are its charges?
Basic hosting features: There are few hosting companies that don’t allow some of the basic hosting features like SSI, PERL, .php, .htaccess, SSH, MySQL, Cron, etc. You need Auto Script installer to install and update apps, .htaccess for page redirect/security issues, MySQL for database management, SSI for static sites, FTP access for easy file transfer, SSH for testing certain script programs.
Even some web hosting companies provide some simple kind of website builders which will help you to build a website in a few minutes using website builder’s drag and drop features. For a detailed breakdown of website builder options.
These are things that can’t be compromised with Web hosting companies.
Pricing: Firstly, I was hesitant to include this point in the list, but it’s too significant to ignore.
The charge of the hosting website depends on the specification you are looking for and the company itself. You should compare the prices of different companies based on requirements and select the perfect web host for yourself.
You should also look at the pricing period as it matters a lot. Generally, monthly plans are better than a yearly plan. You don’t know when you have to transfer a website from one server to another.
There are plenty of web hosting companies that will agree to host your site. As you agree to pay for the hosting service, you didn’t expect anything below satisfaction. Although each company has a little bit of disadvantage, if you’ll follow these points, you will likely select the Perfect Web Host for your Website.
Do you find this post useful? Tell me about your views with the comments below! If you have any doubt? Feel free to ask me questions. Have a Good Day!
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