BeiLover: 2018

Things to consider when buying a web hosting

8:57 PM

You may look for the best hosting company to host your website. You may visit some websites that recommend you the best web hosting companies with customer feedback voting or web hosting comparison list or something else. Anyways, before finding the best hosting company, you should know a few factors which guide you to choose the best hosting company for your website as below:

Identify Your Hosting Needs:

This is very important to know about the hosting requirement for your website. You must know exactly about the type of your website, website features, and what you are going to do with a hosting. Here are some basic things you should evaluate:

Technology that is used for building your website.
Server platform (Windows-based system or a Linux-based system).
Bandwidth and storage: you need to evaluate bandwidth and disk space needs.
The budget plan for hosting your site.

Hosting Type:

There are many types of hosting that offer by hosting companies. So, you need to identify what type of hosting your website needs. If this is a small blog or your company portfolio, then you can check the shared hosting packages of different hosting providers while if your website is big and it will have some content that could go viral, then you should consider getting a VPS, cloud or even dedicated hosting packages. To help you understand clearly about web hosting type, see more detail here.

Hosting Reliability & Uptime:

You should compare the uptime guaranteed and the reliability of the hosting. Reliability & Uptime is a very critical factor to consider. Because it can kill your business. Therefore, web hosting providers which are able to provide high rate of uptime is preferred. The availability rate must be up to 99.98 percent and 99.99 percent.

Load time:

Industry average load time is about 800ms but you should look for some hosting which has about 500 to 600 ms load time.

Hosting Features:

You should also check the different features provided by the hosting provider such as number of websites you can host on same hosting package, number of add-on domains allowed, add-on extra applications (Joomla, WordPress,...), number of email addresses allowed, number of databases allowed and such other features which you would need from your hosting provider.

Add-On Domain: Almost every hosting provider offers unlimited add-on domains.
Extra Applications ( Joomla, Wordpress…): You have to make it sure that your hosting provider supports all the applications and scripts which are required to run your website.
Email: Most of the hosting providers provide unlimited email addresses while a few providers offer only a 1 free email and you have to pay extra amount to get more emails. So always check how many emails you need and how many free emails are offered by your hosting provider.

Costing:

Check the costs for different billing cycles. Few hosting provides $3.0 per month but it is only available if you buy that hosting for 36 months. So check what is the minimum billing cycle to get the best price?

Compare Prices and renewal plan:

You should compare the prices of different hosting providers. The renewal price of some web hosting providers is very higher than sign up price. If you buy for a longer period, make sure that you check the regular price or renewal price too before you decide to go with any web hosting provider. Anyway, don’t always select the lowest price; try to find the best option with suitable resources.

Money Back Guarantee:

Always check before your purchase that whether you have the 30 days or 45 days money back guarantee or not? Normally big hosting companies provide money back guarantee without asking a single question.

Refund Policy:

reading refund policy is an important task to do when shopping around web hosting service. You must know what the hosting company’s refund policy is and find out if there are any cancellation charges.

Control Panel:

Check if your hosting provider is providing you access to a user-friendly control panel or not? CPanel is widely used interface which is easy to use but there might be some other control panels as well like vDesk offered by Fatcow and iPage.

Security:

You will get a nightmare if you missed checking security features when shopping for web hosting provider. Make sure that web hosting companies that you are going to buy their hosting service has great security. So, your site will not get suffer from viruses, hackers, and identity thieves.

Site Backup:

Always make it sure that your hosting provider is good at providing backup as well.

Location:

Check the geolocation of your server. If most of your traffic is from Asia then try to select the server location in Singapore.

Bandwidth and Storage:

Most companies claim to provide unlimited bandwidth and storage but with FUP. For a normal user, 15GB space and 1TB bandwidth are more than enough.

Server Upgrade Options:

A good web hosting provider will always allow you to upgrade or downgrade your hosting package anytime.

Customer support:

Always try to find the hosting provider who has live chat support 24/7.

Customer Reviews:

The customer reviews are the most important thing you should consider before you choose best web hosting. Try to find neutral forums and blogs to read best web hosting reviews which would be neutral reviews.

Conclusion

These are the few things which you should consider as these points are important in deciding how to choose web hosting. Though all web hosting providers claim to be the best, fast and the most reliable hosting provider, however, you should check different statistics of a specific web hosting provider.

Web Hosting

Understanding about web hosting type

10:45 AM

This is very important to understand about web hosting type before you look for buying a web host. There are many varieties of web hosting types which offer different services for you. Therefore, you should gather your entire requirements such as your disk space, bandwidth needs, platform (Windows-based system or a Linux-based system), email account, your budget, and other features that your business needs. That makes you easy to find the right web hosting type to host your website.

Type of web hosting

Shared hosting
Virtual Private Server(VPS) hosting
Cloud hosting
Dedicated hosting
Reseller hosting
Specialty hosting

1. Shared Hosting

As the name suggests, the shared hosting is the one where you host your website along with many other websites. On a shared hosting different websites sit on the same server where these websites share the hosting space, RAM, bandwidth and other resources as well. Most of the shared web hosting providers claims to provide unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth and unlimited RAM as well. But actually these are not unlimited, there is a fair usage policy applies. Sometimes you might be able to consume even 20GB space but at some other time; your account could be suspended even after consuming the 10GB storage.

Shared hosting is the cheapest hosting type where you can host your website for as low as $12 a year. This hosting service is best for the beginners who just want to showcase your portfolio and they don’t have to run heavy scripts and they don’t have good web traffic as well. The user is not responsible to manage the server. A C-panel is mostly provided in all shared hosting packages which can be used to install different scripts and to manage the websites.

2. Virtual Private Server(VPS) hosting

A VPS is a Virtual Private Server. This is the most famous hosting type for relatively large websites or ecommerce stores. On a VPS, you don’t have your own private server, but the resources you have are actually your own. You are still sharing the same server with other people but you are not sharing your resources. You can understand it with a simple example of computer’s hard disk. A computer’s hard disk may have different partitions like C, D, E and so on. Let’s say D is the driver where you have hosted your website. If D drive hosts many other websites as well, then it means you have a shared hosting plan whereas, if D drive is only in your control and no other person can host his/her files on D drive then it means you are using a Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting. The same server may have other websites hosted at drive E or F, but not at drive D.

A VPS is relatively costly solution than shared hosting but it is still very much affordable if we compare it with the cost of a dedicated hosting server. We can say that a VPS is an intermediate of shred hosting and the dedicated hosting solution.

While purchasing a VPS, you can select whether you want a managed or unmanaged VPS for you? A managed VPS will have a C-panel or WHM whereas unmanaged VPS don’t have such graphical user interface. You have to manage your unmanaged VPS hosting account with a command lined interface.

3. Dedicated hosting

Another type of web hosting service is to buy a dedicated server for your website. In Dedicated hosting, a standalone server is provided to host your website and it will not share any space or other resources with anyone else. On a dedicated server, the user has complete access to a Super-user as well and can install almost any software that is supported by the OS of that server.

The problem with dedicated servers is that it is somehow difficult to manage because most of the dedicated hosting packages are unmanaged. The user should have a good knowledge about the customization and configuration of the software or other utilities which are required to host a website.

Dedicated web hosting servers are good for large companies and for the sites which have a high volume of traffic. If your website need a lot of resources like if you are hosting high definition images, audio or video streaming then dedicated server should be your choice. Few good web hosting providers provide a managed dedicated hosting as well, but that comes with some extra charges. So if you can afford, you can get managed dedicated server as well.

4. Cloud Hosting

Cloud hosting is just like a Virtual Private Server. Though it is better than a VPS but the basic structure is the same. Cloud hosting is a server which is virtual and not a dedicated one and it is private as well that no other person is using your resources.

Most of the people describe the cloud hosting as a product which hosts your data on multiple machines which works altogether. But this is not true. In easy words, a cloud works as a VMware’s Fault Tolerance (FT). The virtual machine creates a live shadow instance that creates instant backup of the data or we can say of virtual machine. In case of hardware failure, the system automatically creates a new instance on a new hardware. This is how cloud hosting works. In some aspects, a cloud hosting is better than a simple VPS. For example, you have to pay only for the resources which you are using. Usually shared or VPS hosting charge on monthly or yearly basis, but a cloud hosting offers hourly billing as well. The hour, during which you used maximum resources, you will have to pay extra amount for that hour only whereas for other normal usage, you have to pay the low amount.

You can also increase your resources instantly without any delay and without any downtime. This feature is useful for big ecommerce sites who can’t allow a single second of downtime as they could lose a lot of customers if their website is down for few minutes only.

But still cloud hosting server is vulnerable and there could be a down time. Though it would rarely happen but still there are chances. In any case, the uptime and the response time of a cloud hosting is better than the others.

5. Reseller Hosting

A reseller hosting is not another type of hosting plan. It is just a facility for those who want to start their business of web development and they wanted to offer hosting space to their clients. In a reseller hosting, you can buy a lot of resources and then you can distribute those resources to your clients.

If you want to start your own hosting company, you can use the reseller hosting plan as well where you can get the reseller account in relatively low price but then you can share that hosting among different clients and can earn money out of it. You can get shared reseller hosting or a VPS reseller hosting plan as well.

6. Specialty web hosting

6.1 Windows Hosting

If your website development gone through the Windows platform i.e. VB.net or ASP.net then you should use a Windows hosting which have special features to support the Microsoft products. Along with the programming language, that might be ASP.net, a windows hosting also support the SQL database server. Websites or other applications created using a .net framework will perform best on a special Windows hosting.

6.2 Linux Hosting

A Linux hosting is best suited for the websites which are developed using PHP script. A .net website will not run on a Linux hosting whereas a PHP website will not run on a Windows hosting. So you must be very careful while choosing your hosting plan. You should be aware about the platform that you need.

There are different PHP scripts which are called Content management system. WordPress, Joomla, Magento are few examples. A Linux web hosting server will support all these CMS scripts. You can run any script on a Linux based hosting server. Moreover, for improved performance, you can select specially designed servers for each script. Like WordPress hosting is quite famous these days as most of the websites are developed using WordPress CMS. You can also get Joomla or Magento specialized hosting server.

WordPress Hosting offers special features for hosting WordPress site. Therefore, you will notice that you spend less time configuring and managing your WordPress installation that other hosting services which offer extra application (WordPress, Joomla,...) features. Moreover, the best WordPress hosting offers servers optimized for WordPress development, fast load time, security features that work specifically with WordPress, and WordPress updates. If you have websites created with WordPress, this hosting service is very useful for your businesses.

Conclusion

Hope this article helps you to understand clearly about web hosting types. Now, you can figure out what type of web hosting plan you need. To give you more idea, you should choose any type of web hosting as your business needs. Most web hosting companies offer many types of web hosting plans and flexible hosting migration option. You even start with a shared hosting plan as a basic web hosting plan; you always can migrate to a higher plan. In other word, you always can migrate to a higher or lower plan as your requirement.

Things to consider when buying a web hosting

Identify Your Hosting Needs:

Hosting Type:

Hosting Reliability & Uptime:

Load time:

Hosting Features:

Costing:

Check the costs for different billing cycles. Few hosting provides $3.0 per month but it is only available if you buy that hosting for 36 months. So check what is the minimum billing cycle to get the best price?

Compare Prices and renewal plan:

Money Back Guarantee:

Refund Policy:

Control Panel:

Security:

Site Backup:

Location:

Bandwidth and Storage:

Server Upgrade Options:

Customer support:

Customer Reviews:

Conclusion

Understanding about web hosting type

Type of web hosting

1. Shared Hosting

2. Virtual Private Server(VPS) hosting

3. Dedicated hosting

4. Cloud Hosting

5. Reseller Hosting

6. Specialty web hosting

6.1 Windows Hosting

6.2 Linux Hosting

Conclusion

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