What are the first things you pay attention to when choosing a hosting provider? Given the variety of offers in the market, it is becoming increasingly difficult to compare the services of competing companies.
Perhaps the most attractive service for you is hosting providers offering the lowest price in the market. This is an important factor, however, in addition to the attractive price, it is also worth paying special attention to the speed of hosting and reliability.
Even if the service is very cheap, a low price should not become an alternative to stability. Inappropriate hosting can affect the operation of your site, and, as a consequence, reduce business profits.
In the selection process, focus on two parameters: stability and speed of the site on a particular hosting. Listed below actions will help you to test the work of hosting.
Choose a company
Create a list of hosting companies whose services you would like to compare. You can compare 2 companies for more details about the specifics of each service. Or browse through multiple hosting providers to get a general understanding of the service you are interested in and the offerings in the market.
Create your account
Create a hosting account for each company from your list. In most cases you will be able to do it for free, as hosting providers provide a test period during which it is possible to study the work of a particular hosting.
Place the site
Upload identical copies of your website to each provider’s hosting site. These copies must not contain links to third-party code or image files. This makes the results of the server performance test more reliable.
Do a checkup.
You can check the performance of your site on different hosting sites. Use the webpagetest.org tool to do this. Check each site and compare the following indicators:
- Bytes In
- Requests
Compare the results
There are many tools that you can use to do this kind of testing. Choose the one that is most convenient to use. A selection of the most popular ones:
- webpagetest.org
- pingdom.com.
- ” Site24x7
- ThousandEyes
Compare the results obtained during testing with each tool. Based on the results, you will be able to determine on which hosting your site is showing the best results.
Questions when choosing a hosting
The following 7 important questions will also help you with extensive research on hosting companies.
When is the technical support available?
If you are going to work on your site in the evening or weekend, you need to make sure that the technical support of the hoster will be available to you. And the question concerns not only the correspondence by e-mail – sometimes you need to get an answer as soon as possible (at least within two hours).
See what the hoster has to say about the uptime of the technical support and see if its statement works. Try chatting on Saturday or call the support team late in the evening. Good hosts keep their promises. This is the first rule when selecting a hosting provider.
What level of security?
Does the hoster have its own data center or does it rent together with other companies? How are the servers monitored? Are there enough resources available for backups? Is the firewall being used? The security of web hosting and the choice of web hosting is becoming increasingly important for your business these days.
Can you keep your domain name?
An important part of starting your site is choosing a domain name. It should be easy for your customers/visitors to remember.
As soon as you find a suitable domain name available, you need to make sure that you can save it, even changing once the hoster. Make sure that this option is available.
As soon as you find a suitable domain name available, you need to make sure that you can save it, even changing once the hoster. Make sure that this option is available.
What kind of contract do you sign?
Signing a contract for several years can help you save some money, so these options have always attracted site owners. But in this case, you need to check the policy of rejection of hoster services.
Is a long guarantee of return sufficient? Will you pay penalties if the hoster can not offer you the appropriate conditions, and you will be forced to switch to another company? Find out all the nuances before choosing a hosting provider.
What bandwidth and how much disk space is offered?
Many hosts offer unlimited disk space and unlimited bandwidth. Perfect, but in most cases this luxury is hardly necessary.
Average site can use about 50 MB; 100 MB will be a great option for site growth. Everything you get from above is a luxury, unless of course you expect an explosive increase in traffic and popularity of your projects.
What tools are available?
There is a huge amount of great free software that can greatly facilitate the maintenance of the site. Leading hosters provide their customers with everything they need to build, develop and maintain the site.
Make sure that the control panel is simple and understandable to use (see the demonstration materials, if available), that there is multimedia or commercial applications that you plan to use in your project.
Are there any additional payments?
Check for additional hidden charges that may be required for support, commercial scripts or additional email addresses. The hoster should report these facts honestly and openly. And if something is hidden, it is better to choose another provider for the site.
Of course, depending on your project you may need to answer other questions. For example, about code optimization, about special functions for SEO, about some necessary services. But in this article we have listed the mandatory questions to which you should find an answer in order to understand whether this hoster is reliable or not.
