Important Things To Look For In A Web Hosting Provider

If you are thinking about finding a decent hosting company there are a number of things that you have to consider before making your choice. The requirements of your website when it comes to available resources, your budget, expected number of visits, as well as the purpose and type of the website you are building will all go towards making the final decision on your provider. Since this is a fairly complex question, we tried to break down the most important aspects of hosting so as to at least give you a general guideline on what you should be looking for.

Type of Hosting

There are a number of different types of hosting, with the most popular ones being dedicated, shared, Virtual Private Server (VPS) and WordPress managed hosting. They all come with their benefits and disadvantages, and you need a much more detailed research to make your decision, but to put it as briefly as possible, shared hosting is the cheapest kind, comes with limited control over server settings, and is usually not as reliable as the other types; dedicated hosting is the most expensive kind, but comes with a lot of resources and absolute control over server settings and security; VPS hosting is the most scalable kind, you get a decent amount of control over server settings (but this will depend on the particular provider and plan); while WordPress managed hosting is great if you are building a WordPress site, and comes with great support, but can be somewhat pricey.

Available Solutions

You have to make sure that your provider supports the solutions that you will have to implement on your website. For instance, if you want to run an ecommerce site, you have to make sure that the provider is capable of offering different ecommerce platforms, or able to support the one you want to use.

Resources

The amount of resources you are allocated will determine how well your site functions. VPS, dedicated and WordPress managed hosting providers allocate a fixed amount of resources to your site, while with shared hosting, that amount can fluctuate depending on the activity of other sites on your server.
Always make sure that you get more resources than you project you will usually need, in order to be covered in the case of a spike in your traffic, as you don’t want your site freezing every time there’s an
increase in interest for it.

Reliability

Before signing on with a host, make sure to do a bit of research on them and see if their customers are satisfied with how reliable the provider is. If your site experiences frequent downtime, your SEO efforts will suffer, as will your reputation and number of regular visitors. Naturally, online reviews are not always the most reliable source of information, but if you read enough of them, you may get a clearer picture on your provider.

Technical Support

Another thing that you have to find about the provider before going into business with them is the quality and availability of their customer support. There are a lot of possible issues with hosting that you can’t deal on your own, even if you have the know-how, since they simply have to be taken care of by the provider. If you encounter any of these problems, you want to know that the provider will deal with them in the shortest time possible.