Web Hosting Guide: How To Choose A Web Hosting Service? Step By Step Guide

By Fernando Raymond

Before you launch a new website, the most important decision is choosing an error free web hosting service provider. There are a lot of web hosting companies in the market vary in various factors & types of services. Thus, it is a little bit difficult to find which company would provide the ideal web hosting services for your website.

As there are various web hosting service providers available in the market, it is quite difficult for the customers to select the service provider that could fulfil their needs. Here I am discussing some important points, if you keep them in mind you would be able to select a reliable website hosting company:

Compare Prices

You want an affordable web hosting provider, but you also need reliability. When you see price differences, it’s helpful to remember the old maxim that you get what you pay for. You need to make sure that support department is in-house, not out-sourced. You need to ensure that you are getting complete value for money. You should compare prices & features of each provider before making your decision.

2. Area of Focus

Your website will have its own needs & not every hosting provider will be able to fulfill your needs. Some hosting provider offers great shared plans, but don’t have proper solutions that are good for growing businesses. While other providers have great solutions, but are not suitable for someone with a small recipe blog.

You should check company’s area of focus before you buy, & go with one that understands your needs as a customer. You can also check the reviews on the internet, & many of these will talk about the hosting provider’s qualities & weaknesses.

3. 24*7 Technical support

Technical support is very important & plays a very significant role for customers. Your provider should have a good, solid reputation for their support department. Most of the providers offer different levels of support, such as email, toll-free phone, live chat & much more.

When your site, for some unknown reason, goes down, can you call up & get a live person on the phone? Can they find out what’s wrong & fix it, or at least tell you what you should do to get your site back online.

4. Security

Security is another big factor, to make sure that your server is totally safe from any vulnerability, the provider should take care that all server operating systems are hardened, loaded & managed to ensure maximum web security. Many of the hacking attacks can be prevented by consistent patching by disabling of non-essential OS services.

5. Uptime Guarantee by the web hosting company

Web hosting provider claims of guaranteed uptime of 99.5% or 99.9% in a month. Many hosting provider claims are just to grab the attention of the customers, like 99.8% uptime, 99% uptime guaranteed, but it’s an important factor to consider.

One more big issue faced by the many of the customers, availability of the site. There might be a case that your website is up & running, but it is displaying errors because database application is down. It’s best to clarify with a hosting provider that by availability they mean hardware availability, software availability, database availability or all.

6. Storage & Bandwidth Allowances

As many hosting providers offer unlimited bandwidth & disk space, this may not be a concern for your business. But it’s still important to aware of any limitations to ensure that your plan has enough space for the website to work effectively.

7. Customer Reviews

Customer reviews can be very helpful in evaluating web hosts. Search for multiple reviews from current to past customers because a single positive review can be fake or originated from the company’s own marketing department.

8. Room to Grow

You must make sure that your hosting provider is capable of allowing your site to grow. You need to have the ability to upgrade your account. While many of the providers offer, that ability, many make upgrading easier than others do. While it is possible to transfer your site to a different provider, it is often time consuming & requires a lot of efforts from you.

9. Features & Add-ons

Now that you have your list of your main choices, you need to decide what makes one provider stand out from the others. What special do they offer? Whether its energy – saving practices, multiple data centers or free domain privacy, hosting providers often offer more than just servers

Wrapping It Up

Well, in most of the cases selecting a web host won’t be that difficult & depending upon your hosting requirements, you can choose from unlimited web hosting options available online.

Carefully choose the plan that caters to all your requirements. Consider reviews posted by users on different-different forums.

With that being said, if you are a new startup or a person who is looking to start a website/blog, I have planned to give away 1000 free web hosting packages this year. Also if you are startup in the UK, do contact me and tell me about your business and I will grant a free business website hosting package for your startup in the UK.