I’m asked by many readers about which webhost they should choose to host their blog . My answer is always the same – ‘I’ve never done a extensive study on this but I know some people do .’ So today when Daren offered to write this guest post of his experience of choosing a webhost I thought it’d make an interesting read. Daren runs a Web Hosting Review website where he review and compare the hosting provider side by side and gives a very good insight on web hosting.
There are many web hosting companies claim to be the best hosting provider. They claim to have the biggest web storage, the most effective support yet the lowest price. Their marketing campaigns are so successful that they have flooded up the whole internet and all we are taught is to engage them for web hosting service. But however, is their service really good? Are they providing quality service? Yes it is a tough question when we are all blinded by their advertisement. Thus it is important for us to learn to justify their service ourselves. Fortunate enough, I am given an opportunity by bloggertalkz.com to share with you my experiences in choosing a web host provider. I hope that you will learn to justify the quality of a hosting after reading this article.
Basically there are 4 different aspects we should look into when come to choosing a quality hosting. They are hosting features, hosting performance, customer support and the pricing.
Firstly, we should make sure that their hosting features meet our needs. Web hosting features are actually the main thing we are paying for. So go through their hosting plan and understand what they are offering. When you do this, you will realize the hosting plan contents too much information that you do not know what to look at. So my suggestion is go back to your needs. What are you going to do with your hosting? You want to build a blog? You want to build a photo gallery or internet business? For example you need to build a photo gallery then you are going to need plenty of storage space and preferable a software that can help to manage the photos. So check out their storage and software available in the hosting plan. In term of storage wise, many hosting providers nowadays provide unlimited storage. Albeit the storage is unlimited, but there will be some measurement taken on your usage, so you need to check their Term of Service to clarify this and make sure it serves your needs.
Secondly, you want a good hosting with good performance don’t you? So do check their performance before signing up. For your information 100% uptime is impossible for any web hosting providers due to many factors including human mistake, technology error and etc. However 99.9% uptime is reasonable. So make sure they achieve at least 99.9% uptime. Although that seems to be a small difference, but in fact the 0.1% is representing 40 minutes downtime per month. I will strongly encourage you not to settle for anything below 99.9% as website is meant to run for 24/7/365. To justify their uptime, there are a few things you can do, 1) Read user review. Check out what they say about the web hosting. You can also find that there are many hosting review site does track the performance of the hosting. With that you can take advantage on their report. 2) Check their uptime yourself. Sign up a free account with uptimemonitor and you are entitled to track 3 websites for 1 whole month. So you can track the hosting provider uptime and a downtime notice will be sent to you. Though it takes time but it is accurate. At least you know you are not cheating.
Third will be the customer support the hosting has. As web hosting is a servicing product and we know that the service will not up for100% of the time. So the next best thing to make sure is the support will get the server up again in no time. Also customer support is important for they are the only people we can account on if something happen to our website. You rather make sure they are fit for the job than sorry later. So what we can do is to talk to their support team before signing up with any hosting. Check their response time to your queries. You can also throw some questions on them result from the research you have done earlier for example any clauses you do not understand in the Term of Service. I will eliminate the support who takes longer than 72 hours to respond and those who speak rudely.
Fourthly pricing does play a role for me to pick up web hosting. Pricing here does not mean the cheaper the better. Instead pricing reflects the reasonability of the service. You cannot expect them to give you the best if you were to pay only $1/month right? If you are looking for huge storage, a 24/7 support who take care of your website, a 99.9% uptime server, etc, the price has to be somewhat reasonable. I will try to avoid those hosting that look incredibly cheap. I will go for a hosting with middle pricing.
So here is a rundown on how to pick a web hosting -
1) Know your needs and identify a few hosting providers
2) Check their hosting features
3) Verify their performance
4) Test their customer support
5) Compare their price and finally
6) Go with the one with good quality yet reasonable price.
So here is it, the complete guide on choosing a web hosting provider.
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