The web hosting market is flooded with tens of thousands of different web hosts, all offering a wide variety to choose from. So how do you decide? The truth is that 80% of these hosts offer great hosting and to avoid the 20% that don’t, all you have to do is follow the 5 steps below.
1. Type of hosting platform
The first step in choosing a web host is deciding on the type of hosting platform, usually a choice between Unix/Linux and Windows.
Your choice is largely determined by your website and the technologies used to create it. In general, a website built with Microsoft technologies runs on Windows servers, while most other websites using open source run on Unix/Linux based systems, the standard is Linux in general, and due to the fact Since Microsoft doesn’t charge you any licensing fees, this is also the cheaper option.
2. Hosting Features
Once you’ve chosen your type of hosting platform, the next step is to determine the hosting features you need, for example, blogging software requires the use of databases, and any type of dynamic content requires PHP, you must look at the composition of your site to decide on its features.
Common hosting features are.
disk space
data transfer allowance
bandwidth
fuses
uptime
Refund warranty
domains allowed
Databases (number & type)
CGI, PHP, Perl, Python, SSI
Number of email accounts
3. Connection Speed
The next important requirement is a good connection, ie sufficient bandwidth, this will affect the download speed of your website. A good way to check this is to see how fast their website loads in your browser, especially at peak times such as peak hours. B. when people are just getting home from work. A good hoster will have connection redundancy, meaning more than one connection, you can ask about it when talking to their customer support.
4.Costs
Choosing a web host based on price alone is not a good idea. Remember that the cost of your web hosting is more than just the monthly fee. Think of the total cost of ownership. This includes lost sales due to downtime and slow speeds, as well as downtime discounts, additional bandwidth fees, setup costs, costs for additional features, and your monthly fee.
5. Good customer support
In order to have good customer support, a web host needs to be well established and running a well organized web hosting business. It’s preferable that the support staff is stationed on the server farm and that they are well trained in server administration – it’s a good idea to call a prospective web host’s customer support hotline to get a feel for their level of knowledge, you can also ask them about their business infrastructure.
6. Uptime
When a web hosting provider has a published uptime of 99% that might sound pretty good until you realize that over the course of a month that’s 7.2 hours or 3.6 days per year – that’s 3 days 14 1/2 hours where you don’t make money. It is therefore imperative that you choose a web hosting company that offers a 99.99% uptime guarantee.
