You can read all the online information, phone advice lines or ask your friends and existing companies for their input, but how do you really choose the right web hosting service for your needs?
According to the Huffington Post you don’t so much need a good design or business idea as great web hosting. The good news is that there is plenty of choice out there. The bad news is that you have to take a number of things into consideration before you part with your hard earned cash.
Decide What You Need
The big mistake that many people make is not looking more closely at their own needs. They want a web site, they want it to be easy to use, they want it to have good support. But beyond that? What about bandwidth? How many visitors are they expecting to come to their site every month, hour, day.
Can their host cope with a sudden surge in popularity? What happens to all your data when the system crashes because the local server has been impacted? Before you do anything you need to have a good idea what your website is going to be and the tools and services it is going to require to perform at optimum.
In short, a great web hosting service is one that matches your needs.
Look at the Packages
The majority of decent size web hosting services nowadays will have a number of packages to choose from. Do you want shared hosting or dedicated? What about VPS or Cloud hosting? This can often be quite confusing to many web creators but it’s important. If you are simply running a blog that will have an average number of visitors, then shared hosting is pretty much all you need.
If you are developing an eCommerce site that requires a good degree of security and the ability to cope with large floods of customers, a more expensive, dedicated service. Packages have all sorts of different add-ons that can increase the overall cost so check out what is on offer in greater detail and whether you need it. Try using a comparison engine to compare web hosting features and specifications.
Compare Prices
Yes, price is important. There are a plenty of cheap web hosting services out there nowadays but that doesn’t mean the lower cost option is best for your business. First decide what you need your host to do and then match your package so that it has all you require. Price should always be compared in relation to a range of other parameters to make sure that you get the best deal.
Check the Reviews
Reviews are always a key way to decide whether a particular product is good or not. The trouble is getting through all the five star notices (some of which may have been planted to boost ratings) to the truth. We suggest looking at a range of different starred reviews – low ratings are often left by people who have had a particular issue with the site such as bad service or an unresolved technical problem. While these are not necessarily representative of the overall performance of a service they can be quite revealing.
Give Your Web Hosting Service a Call
Finally, web hosting services often boast about their helplines and support but they are well worth checking out. See what sort of tutorials and support they offer online first, including forums for customers and video tutorials. Then make sure you give them a call and talk on the phone and see how responsive they are.