What To Look For in a Hosting Service Before Choosing

One of the major things to consider before building your website is how to choose your web hosting service provider wisely or What To Look For in a Hosting Service before purchasing. Yes, the existing choices are so numerous that you might feel puzzled sometimes. What you should do is to calm down and keep it straight: understand your needs and read through the following suggestions.

What to Look For in a Hosting Service

1. Price

Like many other services we use, be free or not free are the two commonest marketing tricks. As you see: free web hosting services require you easier configurations with no cost, but have few or no technical supports, limited bandwidth and are ad-supported.

Paid services, on the contrary, accept your independent domain, offer standard technical supports, fully customizable specifications and stable connections. Yet the price is varying from $1 to $100+ and you will have to face more complex settings.

Which one to choose? This depends on whether your website is profit-making or nonprofit, public or private. If you can buy a service at the cost of $2, do not pay $10 for a similar one.

2. Colocation

Although today’s Internet technology ensures your smooth surfing, the latency caused by complicated factors is annoying sometimes. To make sure that your website is well responsive with fast load speed, ask yourself: who are your most frequent visitors? Where are they located? Say, if your website audiences are mostly Asian, you had better try a provider in South Korea or Hong Kong.

3. Customer Support

What can you do when you run into a problem on your site? 7*24 free calls, online chat or email diagnosis, etc. seem essential now. A good customer support will let you find it is worth paying.

4. Additional Offers

Take a look of the discounts and giveaways. The gifts the hosting service providers present you might be exactly what you need to promote the site.

5. Technological Specifications

a. Bandwidth – when your visitors have an average Internet speed, the bandwidth of the web hosting service providers decides the performance of your website.

b. Disk Space – what contents do you want to put on your site: text, audio or video? Think this carefully and not to waste your money.

c. Uptime – the more time your site is working properly, the more profits you will get. High availability guarantees complete global access.

Other things to think over – domains number allowed, databases and programming languages.

Since each of the providers has different plans, do not be superstitious about the word ‘unlimited’ (e.g., unlimited disk space) unless you know that you really need it. Expand the plan when necessary might be better.

6. Reputation

Always check the current consumers’ remarks about a hosting service provider. Go and compare the list of top 10 web hosting companies and see what people are saying about the top competitors. And read the product reviews (by website or users) and test the service yourself if possible. Remember that you have a chance to cancel the deal before buying anything, take it seriously.