Similar to every online purchase, it is not an easy decision to make a choice of a good hosting provider for your online website since there are a myriad of web hosting companies who all claim to offer super uptime guarantee, unlimited resources and professional customer support and their websites are often full of jargon. If you are laymen to web hosting industry, is there a way to guild you to the right decision? Well, this article will cut through terminologies and show you how to compare different hosting provider from following aspects:
1. Price
This is the first aspect that most of shopper will look at when purchasing anything. The same is true to web hosting provider. However, you should not consider it as a decisive factor. As the old saying goes, you get what you paid for. How can you expect excellent customer support from a free hosting provider? If you really take your business seriously and rely on your website to make money, you had better choose an affordable hosting rather than the cheapest or even free service. It will be worth your time and effort to search out the reliability and the feature of a particular hosting package and then compare the price with others.
2. Focused Areas
You should keep in mind the fact that different web hosting company has its special focus areas. For example, some may pay special attention to small size business website, while others may care much about big enterprise. Therefore, it is necessary for you judge from their website or other hosting review website to figure out the business goal of that particular company. If you are simply need to find a home for your personal blog, then it will be not an appropriate to choose a company who focus on big enterprise much. Overall, you should find out the company’s strengths and weaknesses.
3. Customer Support
This is also one of the main elements that you should be aware of when examining the hosting service. Whenever your website gets down for some reason, their technical staff should be 24/7 available to give you a hand. Check out the different contact methods, ticket system, live-chat, phone support. What’s more, you need to figure out their professionalism. When a problem occurs, do they have the capability to fix it immediately so that reduce you lost to the minimum level. Before making your decision with a provider, pay attention to their customer support. Do they speak English fluently? Do they outsource their technical support? Not all supports are created equal. Some companies really care about their clients and offer supreme customer support. Others may consider customer support as an afterthought. Keep away from the latter one.
4. Features / Add-Ons
To get your website up and running, different web application and tools are required. Are there any special features offered in your potential hosting company? Do they provide phpBB so that you could add discussion forums to your website easily? If you are looking to open a blog on your website, do they allow you to accomplish this on the most popular blog platform, WordPress? Is there any extra incentive for you to go with them, for example, a free domain name, weekly backup? If you find that they are providing something you are in need of, then it is a smart choice to purchase from them.
5. Speed and Performance
To keep your visitors coming back to your website, you will need to make sure that the server speed is quick enough. Customers will not trust your website if they come across web server busy errors when they are attempting to place an order. To figure out this, you had better to do some research. Does your hosting company use top-of-the-line machines? Is there any supplement device if any problem occurs?
6. Customer Reviews
How about the customer’s feedback about their service? You can find the answer from web hosting review websites and hosting forums. Do they offer live-chat support if you need to solve the problem immediately? How long can you expect a respond to your ticket? It is strongly recommend you to participate in the largest web hosting community, webhostingtalk.com to obtain more up to data information about best web hosting companies. You can also read the real reviews from current and former customers of different hosting companies on the website, webhostingjury.com.
7. Email Features
If you are going to launch a professional email marketing campaign, a hosting with all-inclusive features will ease you job. Or if you are annoyed at any spam, you need to check out that your hosting provider will offer you with anti-spam solution.
8. Control Panel
A control panel in web hosting refers to the web based user interface provided by the hosting company for you manage your server and implement some tasks, such as, installing WordPress blog, setting up email accounts, and setting up FTP accounts. With an easy to user interface, you can finish these tasks without hassle. Do they use the most popular control panel, cPanel rather than other clunky interface that no one can figure out? You had better make sure that you will be able to set up and maintain your website easily in the future.
9. Scalability
Last but not the least; you cannot figure out your how your website will develop one year later. Therefore, it is important to confirm with your provider whether they will allow you upgrade your hosting package or not in the future since what you consider adequate now might not able to meet your website requirements two years later. If you are going to launch a ecommerce website in the future will many image, video files, then you should make sure they would allow you to upgrade to a high level solution with large amount of resource. When purchasing a hosting package you need to make sure that your provider would like to make adjustment according to your website development. Do they offer dedicated sever besides shared web hosting if a shared on is impossible to host your website? Think about your website envision.
10. Terms of Service
And as a bonus – a final piece of advice. Take a good look at the terms of service. Look to see the obligation and liability of the two sides. Figure out what features are included in the cost and check whether they will charge you for additional domains, support, backups or not. Ask them as many presale questions as possible to what you need for the best price in the market.
Starting an online business isn’t rocket science these days. You simply need to find a reliable hosting plan to make your website available over the internet. This is an important decision that you must check out the above elements carefully. Now there are tons of hosting providers out there with different hosting packages that you can go with.
Hostease is one of the most trusted, reputable web hosting companies from USA. They combine reliability, speed, and superior customer service together to offer you the best cost-effective solution in the planet. Started from $3.95/month, a very competitive price, you will be offered with unlimited disk space, unlimited bandwidth, FTP accounts, POP3 accounts, Cpanel, web based mail, SSL, PHP, MySQL, 30-day money back guarantee, and more!