Amongst the horde of web hosting companies that flood the internet today, it is often a big problem for new bloggers and web startups to choose the right web hosting for their site, even established blogs and websites still face this issue once in a while.
Choosing the right web hosting company and plan to go with depends on so many factors, but once you get the hang of the basics, the rest is easy surf. It is exactly the basics we’re going to discuss in this article.
So are you ready to choose the right web hosting for your company site or personal blog? Are you finally tired of jumping from host to host in search of the perfect hosting for you? Then read on. This post is for you.
The following factors should be considered when you are about to choose a hosting company for your website or blog. For easy navigation and reading, the factors are discussed in an hierarchical order: from the most important to the least important.
I’d advise you not to skip anyone, though. The least on the list is also very important. Also, all categories of bloggers and web users are considered in the explanations, so if you’re a newbie or an established blogger still confused in this area, feel free to read on.
- Server Uptime
This is perhaps the most important factor you should consider when choosing web hosting. The ability of a hosting company to keep your site on-line for 24 hours a day and 7 days a week should be enough to qualify them as the best hosting company.
Though some unforeseen events may happen to cause some web hosts to experience server downtime throughout all sites they host, the rate of occurence should not be more than 1%.
I can recall one of my friends who once had his blog hosted on a german hosting company. I woke up one day to find that he had called me repeatedly, and when I got through to him, he was almost down with grief. He explained that his site had gone down, and same for other blogs hosted with his hosting company. Though the issue was resolved the day after, I advised him to change hosts immediately because the time they took to fix the hosting was too long, but he assured me it was all fine.
About a week after, the same scenario played out, and it happened that the hosting company had totally lost its servers! It took a week of consultations and technical work to be able to switch his blog to another host and get it up and running again.
One good way to compare server uptime scores of different web hosting companies on the internet. There are a lot of authority blogs like shoutmeloud, wpbeginner and webhostingsecretrevealed that monitor these scores, so check around to see which performs the best most of the time.
Another way is to track the uptime scores of several web hosting companies yourself. There are various tools you can use for these, and they abound on the internet. I’m not listing any here so it won’t look like I’m promoting a product.
- Customer support
After choosing a host and setting up a blog, some web hosting companies usually leave their customers on their own. Though there are some established bloggers and webmasters who don’t need monitoring or support from web hosting companies, same can’t be said for new bloggers who are not yet familiar with the complex blogging ecosystem.
When choosing a web hosting company, try to dig around and find out how good their customer service is; how fast and efficiently they respond to queries; various forms of communication offered for support (e-mail, live chat, phone call, etc).
- Control Panel Ease of Use
The control panel (cPanel) of a hosting account is very important in managing external files and online documents for the website the hosting account is activated for. When choosing a web host, try to find out from previous users how easy the Control Panel interface offered is to use, in terms of files management, accessibility and manipulation.
- Upgrading Options
When a site is started out, normally a small hosting plan is chosen, as traffic and web content is still minimal. However, depending on how hard the webmaster works on his site, a website or blog will grow out the basic hosting plan within a year.
So when choosing a hosting plan for your website or blog, choose one that makes it easy to upgrade from a plan with lower bandwidth and disk-space to one with higher bandwidth and disk-space. Some websites or blogs that have become big and outgrown their hosting plans have had to go down for a few days, even running into weeks because of the difficulty in upgrading to a bigger hosting plan. For a new blog or a website just gaining popularity on the net and amassing reasonable amount of traffic, this isn’t good as it could lead to serious reduction in traffic and loss of returning visitors. So, be wise and watch out.
- Price
The cost of web hosting should be the least to consider when choosing a web hosting company to berth with, as quality should be considered over quantity.
That said, some web startups and aspiring bloggers don’t have enough funds to choose hosting with a top-notch dedicated hosting company, so what I’ll advise you to do is gather a list of as many web hosting companies as you can find, and start evaluating each based on the factors listed above, in order of hosting cost.
The web hosting company that offers at least 95% of the above points at the lowest price, should be the one to go for. Also, make sure to check out reviews from customers who have previously used the services of that hosting company to see if they actually stay true to their words in terms of price and quality.
If you have a wide budget, or you’re an established blogger looking for advice on choosing a host for your new site, you shouldn’t be reading this point. You should be up there digesting the other factors and utilizing them in choosing the perfect web hosting company for your website
