Choosing A Good Web Hosting Company

No matter how good a website is, it’s all a complete waste if the hosting isn’t upto scratch. Before starting anything, it is absolutely essential to find a good web host to match the purpose and needs of the website. Here’s a few tips that’ll help narrow down the options.

Reviews: No web host can exist or do business unless there are good reviews out on the internet. Type in the name of the company into a search engine, along with the word reviews (“xyz hosting reviews”). Spend some time reading as many reviews as possible, because most of the time a single review won’t really cover everything good or bad about a specific web host.

Price: Rates are subjective, since it depends on many factors. For instance, how much space and bandwidth does the website need? Is the project big enough to warrant a dedicated server, or will shared hosting be sufficient? How many domains, sub-domains and email accounts are required?

There are plenty of add-ons such as eCommerce tools, design tools, etc. These things may be essential for some websites, in which case the price goes up with each new requirement. It might be a good idea to shop around and find a web host that offers everything required inclusive in the base price.

Windows vs Linux: The server OS is an important choice that need to be made, because it’s hard to switch once the site is operational. Some scripts such as Wordpress don’t run on Windows servers. On the other hand, Microsoft’s ASP won’t run on Linux web hosts. If all this doesn’t make much sense, it’s best to look it up now because it gets pretty hard later on if a website needs a blog and it’s hosted on a Windows server.

SEO: It’s an open secret that search engines respond well to some web hosts while giving short shrift to others. It’s not favoritism, just part science and part algorithm. Every host offers different page loading speeds, IP ranges and hosts specific types of web sites. This is why it’s necessary to understand things like a Class-C IP address and what it means to have a website stuck in a bad neighborhood. It may seem like a lot of geek talk, but it does have a big impact on search traffic.

Features: Regardless of budget or needs, some things should always come by default with every package. The must-have features include a control panel (cPanel or Plesk), POP/POP3 email accounts with webmail access, FTP access, scripting support (PHP, CGI, MySQL database, etc) and web analytics with access to log files. The list of features every web host offers is huge, but the aforementioned things are the ones which are sometimes left out by a few hosts even though they’re all necessary for most websites.

People tend to fixate on the price and hosting support. But choosing a web host involves making an informed decision based on not just the price, but also the host’s reputation and on whether or not the host offers specific things that the site needs.

We’ve got the low down on how to choose a good webhosting provider now in our comprehensive email hosting guide.