Searching for a Hosting Provider?

Finding a quality hosting provider may often proof to be a daunting task. The majority of webmasters will often testify from experience when they inform others of the number of moves they had to undergo between hosting providers before finding the one that suited their needs.

Whether you are a business looking to establish a business-related website, a private individual looking to host a personal blog or a webmaster creating websites on behalf of clients, you need a reliable hosting service, one that would allow visitors to surf your website effortlessly, download files, view images and yet still ensuring your online presence 24-hours per day.

The webhosting market around the world is, to say the least, saturated. There are so many hosting providers offering cheap hosting services, it may often be a difficult decision choosing one. It may also often be the wrong hosting provider you settle upon.

In order to find the correct hosting provider, one that would suit your hosting requirements, we have compiled some recommendations you are free to look at.

The Hosting Company

Always conduct research on the hosting company you are looking at. Determine the age of the hosting company and always be sure to conduct search engine queries on the hosting company. Search engine results may often provide you with information as to how popular the service is and identify any complaints or compliments.

It is recommended that users make use of Google.com, and enter the hosting company’s name in the search field. Then, take a look at all comments from the many websites that will be listed in the results.

Visiting a WHOIS website, such as www.whois.sc and entering the hosting company’s domain name will reveal the correct age of the company.

Disk Space and Bandwidth

A large number of webhosting companies often advertise hosting packages, which range in terms of bandwidth or disk space size. What users should know is that bandwidth is of utmost importance when developing and launching a website. If you run out of bandwidth, your website will go offline. It is important that you look at providers offering large amounts of bandwidth. Reliable companies, such as Hostgator or Godaddy may offer ‘unlimited bandwidth’, which is a good option to go with.

These companies do not really offer unlimited bandwidth, but do restrict website usage by other means, such as inode usage. Still, these companies are large, established companies who are often capable of hosting very large websites without any bandwidth or disk space issues.

Be careful of companies offering minimal bandwidth, such as 1GB per month. Websites or blogs generating 100 to 300 unique visitors per day could easily utilize 300MB of bandwidth per day. This could lead to the closure of your website by the fourth day of the month.

When looking at disk space, users need to estimate the amount of space required. Again, keep in mind that if you establish a website which you intend to update on a daily basis with information and images, you will require large amounts of disk space.

Always ensure that you ask from the hosting company information on the costs of additional bandwidth and disk space before signing up with them.

Programming Tools and Operating System

Often, users may need hosting for a specific script and would therefore require a specific server, such as Linux or Windows, depending on your website’s programming language requirements.

In the majority of instances users will find the Linux operating system sufficient and more cost-effective than other systems available. Always ensure that you shop around at different hosts for the specific operating system.

Another, very important factor is whether the hosting company involved makes use of the latest operating system software. For security purposes, operating system software are released to enhance security on the server. If the hosting company does not make use of the latest software or update them frequently, they have no interest in providing a quality hosting experience.

Users should also determine whether a hosting provider offers access to a control panel. These systems are useful for clients to manage their websites online from one central point and often provide useful tools. One highly recommended system is cPanel, which is easy to use and offer an array of website tools, services and a number of additional add-ons such as DNS control, statistics and much more.

Support

When you experience problems with your hosting, you need to be able to rely on your hosting provider to provide you with support any time of the day or night. Always ensure that you familiarize yourself with the support structures the company offers its clients.

• Is the support available 24-hours per day?
• How do you get in touch with the support on offer? Email, Online Contact Form, Online Chat?
• Will you be assisted with immediate effect, or do you need to wait 1 to 2 days for support?

Quality and reliable hosting providers will often allow users with access to an online chat facility, with is manned 24-hours per day, and offers immediate support. Users will also have access to e-mail support or telephonic support.

Uptime and Backups

A quality hosting provider will, at least, make local backups of all hosting accounts once per week. Be wary of hosting providers not making any backups of websites hosted on their servers. Be sure to ask the hosting provider as to whether they do make backups and the intervals between the backups.

Uptime refers to the number of times the hosting server goes down per day or month. Poor hosting providers could often leave websites offline for hours on end per day. This is not the hosting provider you want to host your website with. Always conduct research on the uptime of a hosting provider.

Services, like hostingdock.com, are a good point to start researching the uptime of well-known hosts from around the world.

Pricing

Always remember the saying: “You get what you pay for”. Don’t just settle for the cheapest hosting available. Many smaller hosting companies will often provide cheap hosting, but cram their servers full of websites, which will slow down all websites hosted on the server. In many instances, this may even lead to websites going offline.

If you need to pay a dollar or two more for hosting your website with a better-rated host, do so.

If you’re looking to establish an online presence, then you will need some form of hosting. One of the most popular is shared hosting. With this, many different people share a single web server. The server hosts many different web sites which all use the same IP address. If you get dedicated server hosting, then only your websites would be stored on a server.

There are many benefits that entice people to use shared hosting. The most important advantage that it has over dedicated hosting is its lower cost. Many people will be sharing the cost of running and maintaining the server.

This means that you’ll end up paying less to host your websites. In many cases, you can find a basic shared hosting package for less than $10 a month. If you need an upgraded plan, it shouldn’t cost you more than $20 or $30 or month.

With dedicated hosting, you can expect to pay up to three times as much as a minimum. This is usually not an affordable option if you’re just looking to host a few websites with minimal traffic. That’s why most beginners typically opt for shared hosting.

Beginners can often benefit from shared hosting because it doesn’t require a lot of expertise to get started. Many packages offer templates to help users get a basic website up and running as quickly as possible. You may have to configure your own server settings if you get dedicated hosting. If you don’t know what you’re doing, then this can be a real problem.

While shared hosting does offer these advantages, there are a few disadvantages as well. For one, only one server is used to host many different sites. If some sites hosted on the server get a lot of traffic, other websites may experience loading delays. Your visitors certainly won’t appreciate that very much.

Shared hosting also doesn’t give you the ability to use custom software or hardware. You will have to use the same thing that everyone else is using. Again, if you’re just starting out and running a small website, then this shouldn’t be much of a factor for you.

One of the biggest disadvantages of shared hosting is the potential for security concerns. If a malicious program is uploaded to the server, it may affect all of the websites hosted on it. Similarly, if someone attacks the server, then all of the websites will be affected. Your website may even be blacklisted if other website owners that share your IP address engage in illegal activities.

You should certainly weight these benefits and drawbacks when thinking about getting shared hosting. You will also need to choose the hosting company that you work with very carefully. There are certain things to think about when making your decision.

One of the first things you need to consider when choosing a shared hosting company is the level of support they offer. If you don’t know what you’re doing, then you’ll likely need all the help you can get. Look for a company that offers email and phone support 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

It’s also important that you consider their up-time guarantee. You don’t want your website to experience downtime much, if at all. Everyone minute that it’s down may cost you money. Therefore, you should join a company that offers a 99.9% up-time guarantee. You can verify this by reading reviews of their past customers. Simply go to your favorite search engine and type the “company name + review”.

When choosing a shared hosting company to work with, you should also make sure that they offer common software packages like WordPress, Joomla, etc. They should also only use current versions that can be installed by the end-user with ease.

It’s good to think about the future when choosing a shared hosting company. Although you may be starting out small, you will likely expand your efforts in the future. Make sure that you choose a package that allows for add-on domains to your hosting account.

If you think that your websites will receive a lot of traffic which can be problematic on shared hosting, make sure that you can easily upgrade to a dedicated server.

One of the next things that you need to look for in a shared hosting company is advanced scripting and database technology. Modern websites often use ASP, MySQL, or PHP, so your hosting company should offer the latest versions of these technologies for you to use.

It’s vital that you take your time and choosing your shared hosting company carefully. It can be a chore changing hosts after you’ve gotten everything up and running. If you don’t know much about the whole process, then make sure that you choose a company that offers plenty of support and guarantees 99.9% up-time.