Whether you’re hosting your website for personal use or business, you need to understand the hosting plan that you need.

So also the hosting company that can provide your hosting needs with optimum satisfaction.

How do I get it right Choosing the ideal Host?

Before choosing a web hosting company for your website, there are questions you need to ask them to ascertain their quality and ensure you don’t end up going with the wrong provider.

To those who’ve been running websites for some years, they know that price is not the most important consideration when choosing a web host.

Some Basic Requirements for Good Hosting Provider

There’s much to compare and evaluate web hosting services than prices, disk space,, and bandwidth.

Security, server architecture, site uptime, responsiveness to customers’ support, live chat support, social media support among others are also much important.

All these are used as strategies in marketing web hosting companies and getting more happy clients today.

These days, a multitude of technology companies are offering their web hosting services at highly affordable prices.

This is an indication of the intense competition within the market.

Every web hosting company tries to persuade prospective client into signing up with them using a variety of methods.

This method can range from business outlook, aggressive marketing strategy, unique promotional offers, plenty of functionalities, as well as lower subscription costs.

Separating the Wheat from the Chaff

Differentiating good quality providers from the bad ones is therefore becoming increasingly complex.

However, as a person trying to choose a web hosting service, you should not be confused in understanding the factors to consider when you’re choosing the right web hosting company that suits your business.

You need to understand what you’ll need to keep your site.

Take security very important either the site is just blog, e-commerce, company’s official site, or for any other purposes.

Will you have your site on a shared server or a dedicated server, would you prefer Apache, IIS, or NGNIX server.
What about the location of the database so as ensure it’s close to your target audience location for fast website loading?
What would the server architecture be, peer-to-peer or client/server architecture?
Are you running your site on Windows or Linus?

There are many factors to consider and if you’re naive in this field. You can just consult a web development company for help.

Once you have determined your hosting requirements, there are a few tips you can keep in mind to precisely determine the quality of a web hosting company:

(1) Customer Reviews about the Company

Search Google for customer reviews of the web hosting company in question.

This will turn up many cheap web hosting directories offering editorial reviews as well as actual customer reviews of the hosting company.

Try to analyze the views of the majority about that particular hosting provider.

A web hosting company with lots of positive customer reviews and a small number of negative reviews is highly likely to be a quality hosting provider.

(2) Age of the Company

This is one of the strongest indicators of the integrity and recognition of the web hosting company’s brand.

The longer the time that a hosting company has been in business, the greater the likelihood of its being a quality web hosting provider.

There are two ways to find out the age of the company.

This means that the company has been in business for 16 years.

In case you’re not able to find any such information on the hosting provider’s website itself, you can conduct a whois search on the domain name of the company (e.g. www.healthpally.com) at http://whois.domaintools.com/.

This will give you the “Creation date” of the domain name, which is the time, month, and year since the company has been operating.

(3) Outlook of the Company’s Website

The third most important indicator of quality is the outlook of the website of the hosting company in question.

A poorly designed website with an unprofessional look greatly increases the chances that the web hosting provider is of low quality.

Although this is not always true analogous to the saying “All that Glitters is not Gold”, nevertheless, a well-designed and appealing website often has much to do with the professionalism of the company behind it.

Secondly, the speed with which the company’s site loads also provides a glimpse of its quality.

(4) Specific Web Hosting Offers

The fourth most important criterion for determining the quality of a web hosting company is how specific the web hosting services offered by the company are.

If you’re looking for shared web hosting, for instance, you should go with a web host that offers only shared web hosting solutions instead of going with the one that offers a range of solutions including VPS, dedicated, managed, etc.

This is because, the broader the range of products offered by a company, the lesser the chances that their services will be able to cater to the needs of a diverse group of people.

A company offering shared web hosting services as a mainstream product with dedicated or managed hosting solutions as complementary services will be able to focus less on the latter group of products.

(5) Customer Support

To gauge the level of customer support services offered by a web hosting company, it is important to pinpoint the diversity of the customer support channels.

A good quality web hosting company will not only offer ticketed e-mail support to its current and prospective customers but will also provide a toll-free number as well as a live chat option on their website.

You can use any of the above-mentioned communication channels to contact the customer support department a couple of times before deciding to sign up with the company.

Try to figure out how quickly they respond to your queries and whether their response is satisfactory.

This will give you an idea of how the customer support department at the company is likely to react to your needs in the future.

(6) Downloading Speed and Uptime

Ask the customer support representative to provide you with temporary space on a server.

Once you have access to that temporary server, upload a 50 MB file and measure the total downloading time.

This will give you an idea of their server speed.

Also, be sure to ask them about their uptime guarantee if they have not stated it on their website.

A good quality web hosting company will be able to guarantee an uptime of 99% to 100%.

They should also be able to provide you with a way to monitor the uptime continuously, and to compensate for any downtime that may occur.

(7) Customer Base of the Company

Another strong indicator of the quality of a hosting company is the total number of customers served by it.

As a general rule, a company claiming a customer base of more than 1 million on their website is much more likely to be a quality web hosting provider as compared with the one stating a figure of 0.1 million customers.

If no information is available on the provider’s website concerning the total number of customers served, you can also search the Internet to find out the size of the customer base for that company.

(8) Own Data Center

A company that has its own data center is much more likely to be a quality provider as compared with the one that uses the data center of another company.

The latter is known as a reseller web hosting provider, which is a much cheaper option in terms of business investment and can be operated by even a single individual.

However, the downside of it is that the reseller hosting provider has no control over the actual physical space as well as the equipment on which the websites of its clients reside.

This is because the reseller web host is just an intermediary between the actual hosting company and the customer.

When there’s a problem with the quality of the server which deteriorates the quality of service, the reseller has no control.

(9) Option of Multiple Data Centers

A company that offers more than one data center to its clients stands a much greater chance of being a quality provider compared to one that owns a single data center.

A major advantage of multiple data center web hosting is that the customer can choose the data center closest to his/her target market.

This will dramatically reduce the amount of time needed for data transfer and the site will load fast for the target audience near the server location.

Dealing with overseas companies can prove to be a nightmare, no matter how attractive their overall offer seems to be.

If you and your business are based in the United States, for example, it would make no sense to sign up with a hosting company that has its data centers located in China.

A major problem with an overseas web host can be the language barrier which occurs because the company is unable to provide its customer support in English.

Now you know, there’s no single factor which is the most important when choosing a website hosting.

Know what you want, review different hosting companies, and find the ones that would get you what you need.

Then, find out about their qualities to ensure you’ll get what they promise.