Things to consider when buying a web hosting

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.