Web Hosting is a service that allows individuals and organizations to publish web pages or sites to the Internet. A web hosting or web host supplier is a company that offers the services and technology needed to view a web page or website on the Internet. Sites are hosted or kept on 
superior, high-performance computers called servers. Your hosting service decides how your business will be perceived by your clients, and incorrect choices can cause the site to be unresponsive, slow, or worst of all – cause a lot of downtime. Because there are so many hosting providers to choose from, deciding on a hosting service is easier said than done.
Quality, Flexibility, Reliability and Price are the four pillars of web hosting that have to be taken into consideration when gauging a hosting service. First, you need to figure out what you’ll need from your server – does my website require custom scripts or special software? What requirements do I have based on my use case? How much traffic will I expect to have throughout the foreseeable future?
Those are some of the questions that you could ask yourself to help you choose the best web hosting plan or service.
Table of Contents
Reliability
If you’re looking to build a website related to your business, one of the key features to focus on is understanding the reliability of the hosting service you’re going to use.
- Uptime is close to 100%: Higher uptime can increase and maintain your business’s website traffic. High uptime ensures that your visitors can always reach you through your website, which makes sure that you won’t be losing any sales opportunities. The more nines a hosting provider has in their uptime guarantee percentage, the less of a chance there is that your site will be offline. Maintaining a high uptime can also represent the quality of your business to your clients – having a service that’s available all of the time can help improve your clients’ trust regarding your business.
- Strong support: Today, most hosting firms provide technical support to their clients – however, not all hosting companies provide high-quality support. You’ll want to make sure that the hosting service comes with technical support in case any problems arise with your server. Therefore, always keep a strong eye and read the company’s statements on their support services (if any) before deciding to choose a hosting service. Paid support is common amongst hosting providers, with a few providing a basic level of free support. A rare few provide fully managed support, and even rarer still do providers give that support for free. Having fully managed hosting is a big deal, as it allows you to have any issues fixed with minimal downtime by an experienced support team.
Flexibility
Before you even start with growing your website or business, you might already have a server set up at another hosting provider. In which case, you might be asking yourself, “Do I need my existing data to be carried over to the new hosting provider that I choose?” In which case yes, web hosting providers that let you migrate your data are the way to go. Some require an additional fee, and some won’t even transfer the data if it’s not from a program or OS that they support. Ideally, the hosting provider should be able to transfer whatever data you have from your old hosting provider to your new one, free of charge.
As your online business grows larger, you may need better hosting services to support your website. When choosing a hosting service, be sure to ask the following questions:
Can a hosting service be easily upgraded to a better service in the future? How much does it cost to promote service to a better package? Having these questions in mind can help you choose a hosting provider that you can grow with, instead of growing out of a server plan and being left stuck with the smaller resources that don’t do the job anymore. Ideally, a good hosting provider should allow you to easily upgrade your existing server without having to migrate anything over to a new, larger VPS. On-demand resource allocation and increases/decreases should be possible.
Quality
Web hosting services often will include small extras to help improve the overall quality and experience of your web hosting experience. With this info, you should understand the standard of a good hosting service nowadays. The quality of web hosting services can enhance your website or blog. For example, web hosting providers can offer software like cPanel and Softaculous for your VPS:
- cPanel cPanel is used as a control panel for managing managed accounts. It works very much like the Windows Control Panel. In addition, cPanel allows you to easily manage your websites while providing as much control as possible.
- Softaculous This is especially important for newcomers to create a website for the first time. It permits you to make single-click installations for WordPress blogs, Joomla content management systems, forums, and many other standard programs without any technical knowledge.
On top of this, services can offer better support, more internet transfer bandwidth, root access to the server, free installation of software of your choice, and so on.
Reputation
It’s also important to keep a hosting provider’s reputation and reviews in mind as well. Usually a good way to gauge a hosting provider is to look at what other people that have tried them are saying. For example, if a hosting provider has a lot of positive and negative reviews, then it’s a hit-or-miss hosting experience depending 0n the use case. Ideally, the reviews should be good for the most part.
Another factor to consider is how long the web hosting provider has existed – it can actually affect how much you’ll be paying. If the provider is relatively new, then they might entice new users with lower costs, however, they might not have a developed infrastructure or won’t be able to provide help for all of the new clients that they draw in with the low price. Reasonably speaking, they should be in business for at least a few years. Over 10 years would be even better.
Conclusion
With all of this information, you should be relatively well-prepared to research and choose the right hosting provider for your hosting needs. Of course, the needs of each client can vary wildly, and in fact, this article might not help everyone with their use case. However, a good list of attributes that a web hosting provider should have some or all of the following:
- Fair prices (more importantly, past the first month or billing period)
- Technical support (the more comprehensive and managed, the better)
- Good uptime (the higher the percentage, the better)
- Expandability (on-demand resource increase/decrease is ideal)
- Control (control panels are good, root access is better)
- Reputation (good reviews, the hosting provider existing for a long time)
Hopefully our article on choosing the best hosting provider has helped you and left you better-informed on what you should look for when considering a new VPS hosting provider. If it did, feel free to share this post on social networks using the share shortcuts, or by leaving a comment down below. Thank you.
You may also want to read How to Select the Best Hosting Service.