How do I choose the best Web hosting services with 10 important Key factors

Rajan | | Blogging | 3 Comments

You’re going to find an answer to “How do I choose the best Web hosting services” in a few minutes. I’ve just written this from my own experience in setting up my niche blog sites.

But before looking into that, you should have some technical background about web hosting then it would be very easy to finalize the web hosting services and plans.

If you know more about web hosting, you can skip the below section and go to How do I choose the best Web hosting services by looking at 10 import key factors section below.

Table of Contents

What is Web Hosting?

Just assume Web hosting or web host as a disk space available in your operating system. When you give the directory path like “/Users/Downloads/File” in the Finder(Mac) or C:\Users in the address bar(Windows), it’ll serve you the files and folders present in the path.

Web Hosting or web host works in the same way. It helps to store your files and folders in the server. Files can be anything like video, images, HTML, CSS, Python, Javascript. Whenever you need your file, it’ll serve those files.

But unlike your computer, files will be hosted on the server(which can run 24/7 & 365 days) and wait for your command to serve with the files you need.

Server is actually a computer or computing machine that runs 24/7 without going offline.

Instead of giving directory path like “/Users/Downloads/File”, you have to give the URL(Uniform Resource Locator) like www.amarindaz.com/best-free-long-tail-keyword-research-tools/ to access the file.

Here “amarindaz” is my root directory and “best free long tail keyword research tools” is an HTML file present in the root directory.

When you hit the URL, it gives back the HTML file in return and browser read the HTML file and show it in the readable form.

Great! Now, you have a better understanding of how web hosting works.

Now let’s see how do you choose the best web hosting services.

What is your Web Hosting requirement?

First of all, choosing the best web hosting services isn’t an easy task. You need to dig deeper to pick the best web hosting services for your needs.

Let’s ask this question to yourself, “Why do I need Web Hosting?”.

Are you going to store static HTML, CSS, Images and video files on hosting? This is what most bloggers will do with help of WordPress app.

Are you going to set up a blog to share your knowledge?

Or are you going to build a simple web app using any programming languages?

Are you going to build an e-commerce giant website or a complex web app?

Finalize your requirement, before choosing the best web hosting services.

Because there are different types of web hosting services available for all needs.

All best web hosting services must have these types of hostings plans in general.

Let’s see in detail about the types of hosting

What is Shared Web Hosting?

As I previously mentioned, hosting is a disk space that you purchase on the server. In shared hosting, you have to share total disk space with other people on the same server.

Let’s say a hosting service provider bought a server having 50 TB disk space. If it is shared among 5 people then each people can access a maximum of 10TB in the server.

Only hosting services can be able to find who are all sharing their hosting with you and how many people are accessing or pointing to the same server.

But Hosting services offer each website/customer with a separate amount of server resources like storage space, bandwidth, control panel, email account, and applications. You are just sharing the space like how people are living in the apartments.

Most of the new blogger/Website admin go with shared hosting as it’ll good fit for newbies and starters. Because newbies often get low to medium traffic and shared web hosting is sufficient to run the blog/websites. They’ll consider upgrading to VPS if the shared hosting not able to manage the traffic.

What is VPS Web Hosting?

VPS or Virtual Private Server is a type of Web hosting where you’ll have a dedicated server(Private server for you) within a shared hosting environment. Does it confusing? Uhh!

In VPS hosting, you’ll have dedicated RAM, CPU and disk space on the server. Unlike shared hosting, you are not going to share the Cores, RAM, and Bandwidth with others. You’ll have full control to make configuration changes on the server as per your needs. It’s like an individual house in gated community.

As I previously mentioned, most of the famous blogger used to have VPS Web hosting to manage high traffic and some of the web developers will choose VPS Web hosting if they need to changes on the server for their web application.

What is Dedicated Web Hosting?

In Dedicated Web Hosting, you’ll offer with a dedicated server that provides a high level of resource allocation, control, and privacy.

In Dedicated web hosting, you are not going to share your server with other people so you’ll get more bandwidth, high RAM and storage.

It’s like building your own house in your own land. You have more control over customizing it as per your requirement.

10 Key Factors to be considered before choosing the best Web hosting services

There are a few important things that you should note before purchasing the shared web hosting services.

1) Hosting Storage Limit

Storage is the most important factor to be considered in web hosting. Most of the web hosting services don’t disclose the storage limit with the customer. Instead, they just mentioned as unlimited/unmetered space but actually, all web hosting services come with limited space.

When you reached the storage limit, you’ll be asked to upgrade your web hosting plan. So, before buying the web hosting it’s always good to check with the web hosting service provider about the storage limit.

2) Type of storage

There are two types of web hosting storage available. Hard Disk Drive(HDD) and Solid State Drive(SSD).

Hard Disk Drive(HDD) is an outdated one and less efficient. Solid State Drive(SSD) is more powerful in processing and handling the files.

Make sure that your web hosting services specify the type of storage explicitly on the shared web hosting purchase page.

3) Secure Sockets Layer(SSL)

While choosing the best web hosting services, SSL plays an important role. Secure Sockets Layer or SSL is a security protocol between your web server and browser. Request and response from the browser must be encrypted before hitting the server.

If your blog/website is related to handling payments or you selling something(ebooks, software or any products) on your blog then you must have SSL installed. It added security to your payment gateway and create trust among your customers.

Best web hosting services must offer this SSL without additional cost. But some hosting services selling it as add-ons for their customer.

Check with your web hosting services and ensure that your shared hosting purchase comes with free SSL or you have to pay extra for the SSL installation.

4) Web Hosting Performance

Best web hosting services offer high-quality server and limit the number of customer accessing the shared hosting so obviously performance will be high.

Unfortunately, you’ll get to know performance either after using it or check out the honest reviews about hosting provider on the internet before making a purchase.

You must ensure that your web hosting service provider offer uptime >99.75%. It’s completely acceptable for hosting to go down once in a while for a few seconds.

5) Web Hosting Customer Support

If you are facing any problem on your blog/website, 99% of the problem comes because of hosting rather than the domain name.

When you run out of any issues while changing the configuration, installing the plugin, unexpected traffic, etc., you have no other choice other than getting help from Web hosting customer support.

There are still some of the hosting providers support only through email and it would at least take a day to get back from them. That’s disgusting. You’ll lose traffic and sales when your website is down.

Before buying Web hosting, make sure that Web hosting service provides support 24/7 through chat and phone.

6) Web Hosting – Money back guarantee

You don’t know what could go wrong after making a purchase of Web hosting from Web hosting service provider.

Best web hosting services just don’t stop their job after they sold out the hosting space with their customers.

After a few days of utilizing the hosting service, if you feel that it’s not a good fit then you should have the option to get your money back.

Best web hosting services always provide 15-30 days money back guarantee. Within those dates, if you are not satisfied with hosting they should be ready to offer your 100% money back.

In other words, the money back guarantee is the trust they had on themselves.

You should check whether they do have the money back guarantee.

7) Control Panel or C-panel

C-Panel or control panel is the Linux based control system which contains a web-based interface to control your website. At any point in time, if you want to make changes on your website internal structure, you can do so via the Control panel.

Best web hosting services offer very intuitive and user-friendly c-panel. Most commonly used applications such as WordPress, email manager, file manager, Joomla, MySql, FTP settings, Bandwidth should come by default or user can install it with one-click.

8) CDN(Content Delivery Network)

Best web hosting service provider keeps their server on various region across the globe. At least, they do have servers specific to the continent.

For example, you are living in Africa and host your website with a local hosting service provider. When a visitor comes to your website from the USA, your local hosting provider should process the request from your region and send the HTML file or whatever to the visitor. It would take a time lag because of your server location.

Best web hosting services keep their server across the globe. So, when a user comes to your website/blog from any country. Your server processes the request and sends the response from the nearest server.

So, the content will be delivered ultra fast. Also, it helps your website from surge traffic.

9) Website Back up

When your website got hacked, you unknowingly crashed system files, deleted critical files, update got failed, malware or virus injected etc., There are so many reasons that you could do more damage to your website/blog.

If you don’t have the backup, you have to build everything from scratch! That’s the worst nightmare for any blogger/website admin.

In order to protect you from such damages, best web hosting services offer the automated daily backups as an add-on when you’re buying the hosting. In such cases, only backups can save your life.

10) Room to grow

As you start gaining traffic, you should also consider upgrading your hosting plan to handle the traffic. Most of the best hosting services offer a starter plan that can able to handle 150-200 views per day.

If your blog/website stats cross those limit, you must consider upgrading to give a pleasant experience to visitors. In this case, you must ensure that your hosting provider should have an option to easily upgrade your hosting plan to the next level.

What do I recommend?

Are you expecting all these 10 most important factors from your best web hosting services? Bluehost is the one which satisfies all these factors. You can check it out the entire hosting features and plans.

I personally recommend Bluehost for shared Hosting (Blogger/small developer), WordPress Hosting (Professional Blogger), VPS Hosting and dedicated hosting.

Bluehost is well known for its performance, Customer support, easy to use control panel, 30 days money back guarantee and easy to install add-ons.

Amarindaz