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What Do You Look For When Choosing a Good Web Hosting Service?
There are literally thousands of web hosting companies and providers trying to get your business. Competition is good in any business, but it can make finding the right web hosting solution a much bigger challenge. Even a professional webmaster can find sorting through the plans and options available a bit of a trial.
When choosing a provider to suit your website needs there are really just a few things you need to consider to determine if they are a good web hosting option for you.
The first thing to consider is what kind of a server you’re going to need. You are normally going to have a choice between Unix/Linux and Windows. This is usually going to be decided by what kind of software you’re familiar with. Most of the open source options such as PHP and peal use Linux, where the Microsoft technologies will run on a Windows based server. Linux is probably the more common platform used.
The next consideration is what features and options you are going to need for the website or multiple websites and domains that you need web hosting for. At first glance with most providers the plans offered are going to look very much alike. But if you take a little time and a closer comparison you will notice that not all feature lists are the same.
What you actually need is something only you will be able to figure out. There are some things that you are going to be looking for. How much bandwidth and disk space is included, how often are backups done, how many domains and sub domains are included, how many and what kind of databases are included. Does it include php, perl, python, cge, ssi, cron, fantastico, etc. How many email accounts and how much storage for each is allowed. And what scripts are included and will the fantastico installation program (if included) install them or will you have to do it.? These are just a few of the things that you want to look for.
The technical support and customer support options go along with that list of features and what they will help you with. Some of the help desks will install scripts and setup databases for you as part of the service and others will charge you additionally to install or setup any additional services.
The contact options available to get a hold of the help desk is also very important as well as the hours they are available. Do they have phone, instant chat, email and faq and tutorial pages. Are they available 24 hours, 7 days a week or only 8 to 5 Monday through Friday. If you pages go down on Friday night and you can not get anyone until Monday morning you just lost out on almost three days of service.
Although pricing is important it should not be the only thing considered when choosing a web hosting plan. If this is the only factor considered there is a very good chance you are going to have a very poor experience. If your website is down more often that it is up then the savings are lost. When looking at cost you also want to look at any additional charges such as setup charges. You also may find that the promised price requires you to pay for one or two years of service up front to get that price.
You also want to make sure that the company you’re putting your trust in has been around long enough to have a track record. You can simply do a whois on their domain name to see if it has been around longer than a year. Most hosting companies go out of business within the first 12 months.
And of course you want your website to be up so that your visitors can see your site. Most web hosting companies offer a 99.9% uptime guarantee. Just the guarantee is not enough, you want some kind of a consequence to something going wrong. A free month of service would be a reasonable offer that shows they value you as a client. Considering you’re usually paying less than $10 a month, if service goes down a day and they just reimburse you for that day, it would only cost them 33cents and not much motivation to keep things up and running right for you.
If you do your homework you should be able to choose a great web host that will provide you with everything you need to get your website on to the world wide net.
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