With hundred of thousands web hosting providers in the world wide web what suppose to be a simple procedure becomes a challenge for those looking to host there website.
Whether this is your first time to buy web hosting services or need to change to a new web hosting provider, use these 6 steps to make the right choice in the market.
1. Platform
The most important first step is determining the platform you have built or will build your website on, this will lead you to choose between Window and Linux/Unix server.
Eg website created with Microsoft technologies (ASP, VB) will run on Windows servers while PHP, Perl, Python etc will run on Linux based systems.
2. Features
This involves knowing things or applications that your website will run as this will determing the features. Web hosting companies are listing features a lot of features; it requires you take your time and pay attention to them and ensure that all is needed to run your website are included.
3. Cost
Cost is very important aspect of chosen web hosting, but that should be a determinant because chosen web hosting provider base on low cost end up most times a disaster, as you need to consider lost in sales, down times, time spend in informing the provider etc, so it is safer to buy a web hosting because it meet requirement not necessary cheap.
4. Customer Service
Customer service is another aspect that is often forgotten about until it is too late, something breaks and you need it fixed and those wonderfully handy sales people who were more than helpful in taking your money are now nowhere to be seen, all the while you’re losing out on sales every minute.
You shouldn’t settle for anything less than 24/7/365 service, your website needs to be running all the time so it’s no good if your hosting company doesn’t work during the holidays. Don’t take the web hting companies word for it, they all claim 24/7 support but few back it up with consistent performance. Be sure to test them out at various times of the day and night via phone, email and live chat if they offer it.
This is one area you have to look for, you should do that by searching the companies in search engines as typing the name of the company in the search engine will bring all the good and bad things previous customers have written about the provider. A web hosting services requires 24/7 support in case any thing goes wrong they will be there to ratified that immediately.
5. Longevity
Yes that is true, go to whois and type the domain of the web hosting provider, look out for it’s creation date, if it hasn’t gotten up to a year, the risk that they would disappear soon increases. No doubt it could be a great web host, but understanding that more than 95% of new webhosts disappear within a year, this isn’t something you should take a chance on.
6. Uptime
No web host can be online 100% because sometimes servers need to be rebooted, software upgraded among other things without which opens a room for security challenges. So 100% is out of the equation. But a web hosting should guarantee 99.9% you know that be search, investigating and reading what customers are saying.
There you have it , 6 simple steps for choosing a good web hosting provider.