A Guide for Web Hosting
What is Web Hosting?
Web Hosting is the service providing space on the Internet for websites. When you make a website and want other people to see it, you will need to publish (or upload) it with a web hosting service.
Price is the aspect of hosting most of us will look at when choosing a hosting provider, but it should not be a deciding factor. As with most things in life, you really get what you pay for with hosting. The cheapest option isn’t always the best idea, especially if you will rely on your website to make you money.
Quality hardware and a high standard of support are the main factors to consider when purchasing a hosting package. The cheapest hosting plans do not usually offer any type of live support, you will want to have the option to speak to someone if you have any issues with your hosting plan.
Tech Specifications & Limitations
Consider what you hope to do with your new website. If you want to start a blog, e-commerce site, or include videos, then you should not go for the cheapest hosting option. Cheaper hosting plans often do not have the RAM (processing power) or disk space to serve all of these features. Chances are, if you take a cheap hosting plan you’ll end up spending more time dealing with website downtime or loading issues than you would like to.
Technical Support
For most people, tech support is the most crucial factor when choosing a new host. When your website, for an unknown reason goes down, can you call up and get to speak to a real person? And even more importantly, can they diagnose the issue, help you solve it, or fix the problem for you?
Always check if the hosting provider has good quality customer support? Can you contact them 24/7? Can you call, email or chat with them online?
A host without support is pretty useless in our opinion, always go with a hosting company who offer free 24/7 technical support. It goes a long way, trust me!
Customer Reviews / Satisfaction / Reputation
It is one of the first things many of us do before making a purchase online, check the reviews of the hosting provider. Are they good at dealing with technical issues? Are their servers good and do they have good uptime?
Email Features
Do you want to have a custom e-mail address or addresses to go with your new website? Then consider finding out if your hosting provides good quality e-mail features with your hosting package.
Do they help you with spam? It is a good idea to find out what email features your hosting will provide you with before decided on choosing your hosting provider.
Control Panel / User Interface
Even if you’re not a very tech savvy person, you should find out if your hosting provider will provide you with a cPanel or User Interface to control your website hosting.
cPanel is one of the most popular website hosting interfaces and allows you to take control of your website features such as email, FTP, or software installation.
If you are going to be the person managing your website, so if you can’t figure it out how to do something, then that’s going to be a problem. We recommend cPanel as it has all the necessary features to truly take control of your website.
Scalability / Room to Grow
An important factor to consider is whether or not your hosting provider can handle your website as your site grows. Do you expect a lot of traffic in a few month/years time?
What you consider to be adequate hosting now, may not be in the future. Any website enterprise should always have its eye on growth and it’s for that reason that we recommend finding a host that can grow with you as you gain more traffic to your website.
Find out if your hosting provider has dedicated servers or VPS? Will they be able to easily upgrade your account? Transferring from one hosting provider to another takes up valuable time and effort which could be avoided if the company can scale your hosting solutions for growth.
