How to find best and affordable web hosting company
By admin | January 21, 2008
There are more than thousands of web hosting company on the net. We’ll be in dilemma to choose from all of these company especially if you’re new in this web hosting industry. Its not easy for us to to choose the best and reliable web hosting company. Some of them offered you for very cheap price per month with unlimited disk space, bandwidth and etc.
When you start analyzing the hosting companies, you can keep following points with you which not only explain what to look for but also how to ascertain its effectiveness:-
Basic Featured offered;
Disk Space and Bandwidth
Firstly you need to determine how many disk space and bandwidth you need. Do not get big offer just of nothing. Its a normal strategy used by web hosting company to offer very big space and unlimited bandwidth. This is because based on experience on web hosting industry, the average customer does not use more than 1 GB space and 10 GB bandwidth per month. Thus whatever bigger than they offered is just to attract the customer. This called overselling.
Email and Database
The number of emails per account should only effect you as per your needs or requirement, do not get over influenced by “unlimited” when you know you do not need more than 10 in any case. Use of MySQL will be important if you need a data base driven site or contents. Please ensure that they provided you with this MySQL database. The more is better.
Control Panel
Most hosting companies do have these in their hosting panels. These make things easier for you if you are to use these. So give a plus to hosting company for that. The common control panel for linux shared web hosting is “cpanel” . Its quite easy for us to control our hosting panel especially for newbie.
Others Features
The must have features such as fanatastico script or the pre installed free script. Most of the web hosting companies do have this in their hosting panel. These make things easier for you especially if you’re new on script or web site installation. So give a plus to hosting company for that.
The log statistic also is a must have features for a good web hosting. Normally the common script for this purpose is webalizer or awstats. This will help you to analyze your site visitor.
Normally we heard that web hosting company offered the capability to host certain number of domain in one account or hey called it add on domain. I think this also very good features you need to have because you can fully utilize your hosting account to host a few more domain without spending any bucks to have another account. The draw back here is only when the server is down, then all of your site will be down because its located in one server.
If you have sites with using the mySQL databse, then the phpmyAdmin also is one of the requirement you need to put in to the consideration. You will need this to modify or edit your mySQL databases.
Support
Support is the most important thing you need to consider when you want to get your web hosting services. What kind of support they are offering ie email only, ticketing system, phone support and a toll free phone. Give an additional point for each service offered. You may need only one of few of these, but eventually it may be important to have a hosting service provider with more kind of mechanisms to be reached to.
Note the response time to your sales requests. Better host respond within 1-2 hours. Note that the auto responder is not to be rated as response, though that does indicate a bit effort. Better to have 24×7 life support from them.
Physical location
Do they have physical office location. It may be a indication of serious business, this also ensures that you do not run into part timer. You can always ascertain it from the contact us page, by calling them, seeing if only a mobile number is given and not a land number etc. Its not that a part timer or the one who cannot afford an office location cannot be good in provision of services, yet generally the one with physical offices may mean a bit more settled ones. This may not be totally true in all cases.
Price / Cost.
Not always the ones who are cheaper are good and not always ones who are expensive offer high quality services. Better is to stay away from two extremes in cost. Mostly one can think and expect that the ones asking a bit higher prices should be able to afford management of things better.
Reliability
Every web hosting service provider will have more than 99% uptime listed on their site. But few have the courage to provide independent prove of their uptime. Ask for it. A hosting company should always have a monitoring service and should be able to provide you a report of the same.
Money back guarantee
This the last one thing I need to add in this list. Please make sure that they give you at least 30 days money back guarantee. Some of the web hosting company can offer you until 90 days money back guarantee. This important because you can try without harm in case that their hosting service is sucks.
All of these are the basic things as my experience and others experience as web hosting customers. There might be many more things need to put in the consideration before sign up in any web hosting company.
Topics: Web Hosting Tips |