Website hosting is a compulsory service for a personal or business website to be launched online and accessed by others via Internet connection. It is technology service which your website is hosted and stored on servers. Some providers also offer other services, such as management service so that you can save time and effort on setup and administration job instead of hiring a permanent person to take care of your server.
In the market, there are many types of website hosting, which can be suitable for different demand and CMS. There exists a great number of website hosting providers, who promise many features and benefit. Among all those factors, some are essential but some are just marketing trick to make their plan seem to be attractive. Choosing a right website hosting is not easy because it requires careful consideration between types of website hosting and provider also. Just a decision at a point of time can have an impact on your website performance in the long-time. Website hosting is software as a service (SAAS) so you have to pay monthly to use the web hosting service. If you want to change website hosting, it will take much effort to move from a server to another one. Therefore, a deliberate thought about your suitable website hosting is highly recommended.
However, in order to make a right decision, you need to have basic knowledge and understanding about website hosting and criteria about a good website hosting.
There are several types of website hosting, which is specially optimized for different CMS, such as Joomla or WordPress. If you work on Joomla or WordPress, you can refer to those sharing to make a right decision:
05 things to consider when choosing joomla hosting
How to choose the best WordPress hosting
Besides, there are also shared hosting, virtual private server and dedicated server, which are divided mainly on capacity. If your website has large volume of traffic and requires confidential privacy, dedicated server or virtual private server can be suitable. Visit our blog post to read more about the comparison between those servers.
There are some types of website hosting servers and different criteria accordingly, however, there exists some crucial common factors which are applicable to all sorts.
1. Price and renewal cost
As I mentioned above, hosting server is a SAAS model so you take monthly payment to use the service. Not only price but also renewal cost should be carefully compared between providers to really save cost in the long-time. VPSTrust is one of the best price providers in all types of website hosting. Beside free plan for basic demand, other packages just start at $2.99. Virtual Private Server with Management service is reviewed with the top quality and best price ever.
Price is one criteria but do not jump at the cheapest one. It should be judged in combination with other factors below.
2. Scalability
You should not underestimate the importance of scalable possibility. Are your potential candidates for hosting provision able to accommodate your future growth? Does it have any difficulties in upgrading? Are Virtual private server (VPS) or Dedicated server available so that you can move your server when your business grows? A bonus point is given to the companies who can give you a hand in upgrading account.
3. User-friendly interface
If you are not an expert or master in website administration and do not have any intention to hire an administrator, an intuitive interface is really important. Or even you are a tech-savvy, user-friendly control panel certainly saves you much time and effort in daily admin tasks. CPanel or Plesk makes updates and modifications easier.
4. Support availability
It hiddens many possibilities for technical troubles so choose the companies who guarantee 24/7 support time. Technical experts with good knowledge and experience about website hosting will be really useful when you website encounters any problems. If your website insists on uptime, this criteria should be in top priority.
5. Customer Review
Customer review is an authentic way to verify the quality of hosting service. Spend some minutes to read through the website hosting review on some review sites or even in their own website or forum. Take reference to some sources to have diversified opinions.