Every designer or developer who has worked with websites knows the importance of hosting. Web hosting is among the top important things that you have to consider before starting the website creation. Selecting a really good web hosting company can do your half of the work.
Many people talk about how a website should be designed or how to hire the best designer but, the importance of having the best web host is often not considered an important topic to discuss.
So, why do designers and developers need a web host?
- Assurance. In order to make your website go live on the Internet, web hosting is required. If you think that registering for a domain name is enough than you are mistaken.
- Accessibility. Having a website hosting company will make it sure that your website is accessible by everyone around the world. You can surely design a website but if you don't have a web host, no one can access your website.
What is Website Hosting?
Website hosting actually means that you are buying some space on the web server so that you can store your website files in it. When Internet users search for your website through your domain name, they will automatically be transferred to your site.
Why Is It Necessary?
Good web hosting becomes necessary when you want your website to be online all the time. What's the point of having a web host when your website is more offline than online? That is why you should always choose a really good web host.
But, the question is how do you choose a good web host?
So, how do you choose a good web host? Today's post is for all those who are looking for a good web hosting company for their website. In this article, we will discuss about the things that you should look for in a host. Let's start!
Choosing a Hosting Plan
Choosing the right hosting package is the first thing that you should consider. It mostly depends on the purpose of your website.
- Shared Hosting is enough when you are choosing the host for your personal blog or for a small website.
- Committed Server or VPS if your website is generating a good amount of traffic and is based on a large scale
You need to remember that while choosing an ideal plan, you should always think about:
- Getting sufficient space
- Bandwidth
Once your website starts to grow and you don't have enough space left for it, then, it will be the worst thing for your website. However, choosing a good hosting company will give you the access to upgrade your host plan as soon as you think it's necessary.
Before you choose the web hosting company, think about:
- Whether the company is providing the support of some important features such as PHP and MySQL, etc.
- Whether the numbers of MySQL tables are allowed in the plan or not
Bandwidth and Disk Space
Bandwidth is very important factor to consider because handling the website traffic depends on it. The more bandwidth you have, the more traffic your site can handle at a time. It can be tricky to evaluate how much bandwidth and disk space is being used because majority of web host companies call everything 'unlimited' now.
What's the Problem of Being Unlimited
How excited do you get when you see unlimited bandwidth and unlimited space in web hosting?
In reality, this is only a tool that web hosting companies use to attract you. They know that your websites on a given server will not use resources other than what they have fixed.
They make you a fake promise of giving everything unlimited. If your websites cross the amount of resources that they have provided you, it can be taken offline or can go disabled for a temporary time.
It's All in the Terms and Conditions
Information regarding your fixed percentage is given in the terms and conditions. You should carefully look it before accepting the agreement.
Quality Support
A quality technical support is very important to help you out on different issues from time to time. You obviously want your questions to be solved as quickly as possible and web hosting companies know it. The very reason why majority of web hosting companies are providing online ticket and phone support.
However, some companies only give you one of these two options. I would recommend you to go for online ticketing support:
- Phone support is, most of the time, busy and makes you to wait for a long time
- If you go for ticketing support, your issues will be resolved within hours
What matters that most is that the support is available to you when you need it. So, always make a search about the technical support that your preferred host company is providing before you choose it.
E-mail Facility
Make sure the host you are choosing is providing an e-mail facility for your website. Obviously, you would like to have a professional looking e-mail address that your users can use to communicate with you directly.
Few web host companies only offer you the traditional POP3 account. Most of the times, it is without the facility of sending outbound e-mails. This leaves you to use ISP to sort out the issues with your customers.
Good hosting companies give you a wide range of options, such as access to hosted Microsoft exchange services and connectivity with the Gmail.
Here's you should note:
- Carefully analyze your website requirements before choosing any web host
- Make sure that they are offering a fully functional e-mail facility with your selected package
Comparing Price
I can understand that many startup designers and developers search for a free web hosting because they find it difficult to compare different prices. But, you should know that very cheap and free hosting companies make their money by putting ads in your website. Technical support may not be there too.
A good technique for choosing the best host is comparing two or more web host providers.
One thing that I would like to add is that, you should never go for a web host only because their price is reasonable.
Always make sure to consider:
- Contract lengths
- Offered discounts
- Commitment time lines
- Technical support
Web hosting is not so expensive and you can easily afford some extra money if you are given all these benefits.
Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Considering CDN feature is very important before choosing a web host for your website. CDN helps you to divide the load of heavy traffic on your website across multiple networks rather than using a single server. So, make sure that your web host company is providing you Content Delivery Network feature in their web hosting plans.
Web Hosts to Consider
Now, let's take a look at some web host providers that are reasonable in price and high in their quality and customer support.
WP Engine is a professional web hosting service for WordPress. WP Engine gives you an interruption-free hosting server with the ability to handle pressure. Don't worry about getting hacked because it's hacker proof. A strong and lightning -fast customer service makes it a very strong candidate for your website hosting.
Some of their offers include:
- Daily backup
- One-click restore point
- High quality security
- Automatic caching
- One-click staging area
With its WordPress experts, you can feel relax about any issues that come to your website. Currently WP Engine is providing a personal plan for US$29.00/month, which includes unlimited data transfer and 10 GB local storage. Other plans are also available with more features but with slight price increase.
iPage makes it easy for you to have a website, whether you are in the starting stage or at an experienced level. With its very affordable web hosting plans you can enjoy all those features that you wished were in your website.
Some of its core features include:
- Unlimited disk space and bandwidth
- Unlimited domains
- Unlimited MySQL databases
- You can also design and build your website through its drag-and-drop builder tools
With its enhanced security suite and 24×7 Network Monitoring, you can enjoy a world-class technology. Set-up is totally free with price of US$3.95/month.
HostGator is one of the top web hosting sites. It is famous for its award winning 24×7 customer supports. It is very affordable.
It offers many features for its customers such as:
- Unlimited disk space and bandwidth
- Easy control panel
- One-click script install
- 24×7 technical support
- 4,500 free website templates
You can get all these features in only US$ 3.96/month.
Other plans include:
- Reseller hosting starting from US$19.96
- VPS Hosting starting from US$15.96/first month
- Dedicated servers starting from US$139/first month.
With 24×7 customer support, Host Monster makes sure that you get a superior support experience.
Host Monster offers you a powerful hosting with supports such as:
- Front Page extension
- SSH Access
- PHP
- MySQL with cPanel control panel
- Site builder
Its features include:
- Unlimited domain hosting
- Unlimited space and bandwidth
- Unlimited e-mail accounts
You can utilize all these features with many more in the package in the price of US$ 3.95/mo.
Conclusion
All the points that we discussed in this post are very important to consider before you make your mind about any web hosting service provider. Make sure that your existing web host provider is offering you all the features that we discussed, if not, then, it's time to switch.
In the end, please tell us about which web host are you using for your website? What is your satisfaction level with your web host provider? Also, if you would like to add some points to share your thoughts feel free to do it by commenting below.
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