Website hosting or commonly referred as web hosting is one of the most crucial aspect of your online business. Website hosting is one of the first things you purchase in order to setup your blog or website.
Poor choice of website hosting service or company may lead to major problems like;
- Excessive downtime
- Slow server response leading to slower website which eventually leads to loss of traffic and business.
- Slow website lead to poor seo rankings on google which again, result in loss of business as organic traffic is like oxygen for any kind of online entity.
How To Find A Suitable Website Hosting
Best overall hosting service- Hostgator
Premium & best wordpress hosting- WPEingine
Finding an appropriate web hosting is not very complicated but still requires you to go through that typical cycle of anxiety, apprehension and whole lot of questions.
So entire process of finding out a suitable website hosting company should be divided into two phases;
Phase 1- Identify your priorities and requirements.
Priority basically means the kind of services which are really important for you, for example- Web hosting is primarily divided into Linux Web Hosting and Windows web hosting. Linux is economical whereas windows hosting is expensive. Therefore you need to prioritize it. Similarly, you need to ask yourself if you need a managed hosting or you are fine with un-managed hosting. It depends upon your skill set. If you can manage your hosting account, then you don’t need to spend additional money on buying managed hosting. But remember, managed and un-managed comes into the picture while finding a VPS web host.
Now this brings us to another question, what kind of hosting you need?
This is your requirement.
Requirement means features are must for you to setup your business. It could be bandwidth, space or specific types of hosting like java hosting, hosting for apps etc.
Primary requirement which you need to evaluate is the kind of hosting you need. There are broadly four kind of web hosting currently available which depends upon the traffic you expect to get and the content management system you are using for your website.
WordPress hosting is best for wordpress users but it will cost you more than conventional website hosting.
Shared hosting– it is the cheapest form of hosting and it is best for newer blogs/websites or any website with lesser traffic.
VPS hosting– VPS or virtual private server hosting is best for website which has higher traffic (few thousand visits per day and depending on your site) or if you are looking to host multiple websites with more control on your hosting. As mentioned earlier, it is further divided into managed and unmanaged VPS hosting. Managed hosting is ideal for those users who are comfortable with managing their hosting account. It includes doing technical changes to your server. As it is completely done by website hosting company, it is expensive than unmanaged vps hosting. So if you are fine with managing your hosting account, you should not pay any extra buck and can go ahead with a unmanaged hosting.
Dedicated Server Hosting– it is for extremely large websites. You will get your own machine/server and it is the most expensive of all.
And as mentioned earlier, you also need to check out if you need any programming language for your hosting like java, php etc. Most of the web host support most of the programming languages but still it’s better to get clarification in advance, if you need.
This should be the first step in your journey towards finding out the best and most suitable web host for you.
Therefore, Instead of looking at individual website hosting company in the first step, look at your priority and requirements.
Once you are done with the first step and you know the type of web hosting account you need. You should move to Phase 2 of finding out a suitable website hosting company for you.
Phase 2– in phase 2 of finding out a suitable web hosting, you will look into the individual website hosting service provider or company. In this phase, you will use certain parameters to evaluate these web hosting companies and these parameters are;
- Uptime
- Customer support
- Features like diskspace, bandwidth etc
- Managed or unmanaged in case of VPS hosting
- Pricing
- Brand value
To begin the phase 2, I will suggest you to go for major brands in web hosting industry. Reason is quite simple, they can afford high quality infrastructure. Smaller companies struggle to maintain good quality as they simply lack money to acquire them.
Pricing is extremely important as it directly impacts your profitability.
You also need to check out reviews on their customer support as it is going to do troubleshooting for you in case a situation arises.
Most of the Free Web Hosting doesn’t support versatile hosting to fulfill your requirment and most of the established players like Godaddy or hostgator offer Cheap Web Hosting in form of shared hosting. So you don’t have to bother about the cost because that is minimal without any compromise.
How To Find A Suitable Website Hosting
Above mentioned two phases or rather steps will always help you in finding the most suitable website host for you. Requirements, priorities and budgets are always custom so evaluate your option and choose carefully.
And yes, if you already have a Domain Registration and you want to host it with some other host for better services and cost, you can do that easily. You just have to update nameserver details with your current domain registrar.
Some of the useful reading for you;
List of best shared hosting companies
WordPress hosting for smaller blogs
VPS Face-off between best VPS website hosting companies
Knowhost Review (I use knowhost)
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Very useful and creative
Hello Dear, This is really great information to provide you, Thanks for sharing it with us.