Web Hosting Guide: How To Identify a Quality Web Hosting
There are thousands of hosting providers out there doing all kind of marketing campaigns to attract your attention. As a potential customer like you without any prior knowledge on hosting, it is very easy to fall into their sweet talk. You are lucky if you fell into a good hosting, otherwise you are going to suffer for a long period.
Therefore it is always important to do researches on web hosting providers. Don’t worry if you are not computer or IT savvy. Web hosting is not rocket science and researching a hosting requires only your common sense. As long you focus on the right things then you are not far from the best deal.
So what you should focus on?
There are 4 things I look into in judging a web hosting. And you will learn about them thorough this article. For your information I have written them based on my personal experience. I consider them true from my heart and I hope they will help you in getting your best web hosting.
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Web Hosting Features
Web hosting features are basically the physical things you are paying for. Physical things include the storage space you get; the data transfer allowed; the add-on domains allowed; the software included and other features you can get once you subscribe to them.
To research a web hosting you need to look into their hosting features. This information usually is listed nicely in a table under the hosting plan details. Read through the table and understand what features you are expecting.
Is Unlimited For Real?
Nowadays unlimited storage and data transfer are commonly offered by most of the web hosting providers. With unlimited it seems that you can store unlimited things. But beware! It is impossible for any hosting provider to give unlimited storage. What they actually mean by unlimited storage is you can have as much storage as possible subjected to their terms and conditions. So what are their terms? Be smart to check out their Terms of Service (TOS) document to get solid information about this. From my experience this is not an issue if you are not hosting something extremely big. I host 10 medium-sized websites in one unlimited storage account and face no problems. However TOS differs among providers, thus read their TOS.
For your information, you will need a domain name as your primary domain when you purchase a web hosting plan. So do remember to check whether that domain comes free or you need to pay extra for it. Check also is there any freebies come along with your subscriptions. Some providers give free advertisement credit up to $100 and free website templates.
These basically sum up the things you get with the plan.
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Web Hosting Performance
After knowing the hosting features, it is then their performance coming into the picture. How is the hosting performing? Web hosting is meant to host your website 24/7/365 without fail. With the ever-growing technology, good performance is no longer enough. What we want is perfect performance. However the perfect 100% uptime is never possible, so if someone offers you a 100% uptime hosting, it is confirm that he or she is lying to you. While 100% is impossible but 99.9% is reachable. Let’s see how the 99.9% uptime breakdown looks like.
There are 365 days a year, which translates into 365*24*60 = 525,600 minutes and 0.01% of it equals to 52.56 minutes. If a hosting claims to have 99.9% uptime, means their hosting will be down for around 1 hour annually. This is acceptable. What if 90% uptime? The number looks great but it means the hosting will be down for 10 hours annually. Well that is not acceptable.
The question is how do we check on a hosting performance?
It is easy. There are many hosting monitor services around like uptimeauditor and you can sign up a free account with them to track the hosting. However that consumes time. The easier way is to take advantage from the hosting review site. Most of the review sites have hosting monitoring service where the webmaster shows the performance graph of the hosting. You can then easily know their performance. Is that all? No! You should also check the graph source. Who provides the performance graph? Is the report from a reputable hosting monitoring party? Check the reliability of the report.
99.9% uptime is a must! Do not compromise anything lesser than that.
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Customer support
Customer support is a very important element in a hosting deal! Without good support, a hosting will be lousy no matter how good the features are. This is because customer support is the people who work behind the servers all day all night to maintain and monitor the hosting performance. They are also the front line people whom we address our problems to. A quality support will basically give you the sense of reliability. Imagine your problems are solved within seconds. Don’t you feel secured to host with them? Therefore a quality support is necessary to complete the best deal.
Having that said, we have to choose the hosting with the best customer support.
Here come the difficulties. Customers support is in fact a very subjective thing due to its servicing nature. How do you define a support a quality one? You have your definition but others have theirs too and all definitions are unlikely the same. Consider this: you said their support is lousy by your experience but he met a responsible staff who solves his issue fast; You said they are slow in responding but he gets reply in minutes and etc. All the adjectives used to rate a support is subjective. Your slow can be his fast; your lousy can be his excellent. Can you see the difficulties now? That is why you can hardly take people’s word easily regarding the quality of customer support (nevertheless others words serve as good reference).
Believe in your instinct!
By my experience, in order to get the best hosting deal (perhaps the more correct word to use is “your best hosting deal” since it is kind of personal), you really need to talk to the support yourself. If you have good feeling with them, it should work for you. Only you can tell.
However here is a few recommended elements you should check on the support;-
- Do they respond fast?
- Are they knowledgeable all the time?
- Are they able to handle issue independently?
- Are they helpful? Do they sound like willing to help?
- How about their politeness? Friendly?
Basically, you need to make sure they know their stuff well and are helpful when there is an emergency issue.
Pricing
I am not sure whether you experienced this before. I got a shock when I was to complete my order during my online shopping. I realize the charges are different from what I expected. That really irritated me. However when I look closer into the pricing, I see the truth. Beware of the pricing of web hosting! The number printed big on the banner does make the hosting looks cheap but it usually comes with a longer contract term. So what I usually do is to run a virtual ordering. Through the virtual order I learn the final price of my hosting.
A reference for you, at the time of writing, $5 per month could get you a quality shared hosting easily. Be smart to compare price among the hosting providers.
With researching these 4 elements, it will lead you to the best web hosting. It sounds easy doesn’t it? Guess you can now choose a good hosting by your own without feeling doubtful with the suspicious hosting review around. I wish you all the best and I hope this guide does help you in choosing your hosting plan. If you still need hosting recommendations, you could read my web hosting reviews to grab some big names.