What to look for in a web hosting company.
Some people allow themselves to be cost driven when choosing their web hosting service, but low cost alone is simply not enough in today’s competitive market. Price is certainly important, but value, quality, and reliability are much more desirable traits in a web hosting company than cheap service. A good web hosting company should have rates that are reasonable and consistent with the value of their services. Sometimes this still means a very inexpensive rate since web hosting is in high demand, but always do your homework to ensure you are making the smart choice.
If not price, then what are the most important qualities to look for in a web hosting company? Reliable service is the number one most important detail in a web hosting service because if your web hosting service is down, NO ONE is seeing your website! If you are also a web hosting reseller, then no one is seeing your customer’s websites either, and we all know that’s bad for business! As a reseller, downtime also brings your dependability into question, so for the sake of everyone’s reputation, choose a dependable source!
Now we all know things happen from time to time, and you will never see 100% guaranteed uptime from anyone. You will find in your search many 99.9% uptime guarantees. If there’s no guarantee directly advertised, don’t shy away - just ask.
When downtimes do occur, technical support MUST be superb. Knowledge bases are excellent resources for quick answers to questions and common problems, but when real technical issues occur, I want immediate help. Support tickets are great as an organized way of getting your problem reported. The most important factor of a support ticket is the response time. Make sure your web hosting company has a good track record for response and resolution to their support ticket submissions. Initial responses should be less than one hour. The parameter of the problem will dictate the resolution time, but you need to know they are working on it. I also love to see a technical support phone number or live chat 24/7, but excellent response time on trouble tickets eases my mind when these are not available.
Last but not least, let’s talk features. Determine what you need to support your site, which features are important, and what can be compromised if necessary. Many web hosts today offer unlimited disk space / data storage and unlimited bandwidth a.k.a. website traffic / data transfer. About 5% of all web hosting customers need a remarkable amount of disk space and bandwidth, but for the rest of us, take no less than 1GB of disk space and 20GB of bandwidth in this competitive web hosting market. If the company you are looking at offers unlimited on these features for a good price, why not! So compare and choose what you like to narrow it down to your perfect web host.
Posted by Debbie at WebHostingDoc.com
Tags: new hosting, web hosting
