Some things to consider when looking for a place to host your website.🤔
Here’s a simple list of all the things we look for when looking for the best web hosting company. After all, it is essential to know about the company that is going to be housing your website.
Some questions to ask about your Web host:
- What Types Of Web Hosting Services Are Offered?
- How Is The Web Hosts Support/Staff?
- Is there any Protection or Security Offered?
- Where is the location of the Servers?
- What Are their Pricing and Affordability like?
- Does the Web Host Specialize in something?
What Types Of Web Hosting Services Are Offered?📙
There are a handful of different services a web hosting company may offer. This all is dependent on you as the customer on what kind of website you have. If you have more usual traffic to your website. It may be a good decision to go with unlimited bandwidth and unlimited storage packages. If your website is much larger and or you want more control. You may need to look into other options such as a VPS, or some form of Dedicated hosting.
Although the most affordable options and best for beginners will tend to be shared hosting packages. These kinds of packages tend to come bundled with security and website maintenance features. However, this would depend on the web hosting company you decide to choose. Web hosting companies such as Siteground, Kinsta, Dreamhost, and Nexcess are incredible at having daily backups paired with maintenance features and a very easy-to-use User Interface.
How Is The Web Hosts Support/Staff?🙋
When it comes to the way your Web Hosting company can support you this can vary from web host to web host. Some offer live inbound telephone support, live chat support, email support, or even knowledge bases articles.
Some companies may only offer specific types of support. For example, Namecheap and WPX only offer 24/7 live chat support. So it’s definitely something to consider when looking for a web hosting company.
Although in the case you see that companies have 24/7 live chat or only email support. Their support response time is typically faster than usual. Some companies such as WPX even publically make the claim that they have insanely faster than normal response rates. They state on their website they have an average of a 30-second response to their live chat. Learn more about WPX here.
Outside of only live chat and email support, this comes down to how you like to receive support from your web hosting company. If you like communicating with someone verbally there are some hosting companies that offer this as well and not only live chat or email. Such as Hostgator, BlueHost, iPage, and A2Hosting. These are a handful of companies that offer the whole spectrum of inbound telephone support, 24/7 live chat support, and email support.
Is there any Protection or Security Offered?🛡️
Something that most people don’t talk about is the dark sides of the internet. One of these things being malware and any other cyber security risks. This can be a concern for some website owners as there are attacks that can happen. Typically infecting the files on your website, which can be somewhat difficult for an inexperience user to remove.
In the case, this ever happens there are web hosting companies that offer support to combat against this. They have software that either have daily scans or weekly scans to find breaches if they ever occur. On top of these scans the companies that handle these scans can usually go in and remove this malware for you. Sometimes at a cost though. Some web hosting companies don’t offer this though and you need to do this yourself. In most cases, web hosting companies are partners with other companies that offer website security and malware removal services.
Where is the location of the Servers?💻
What are Web hosting Servers? These are where your website data is stored and the closer they are to you or your ideal traffic the better.
Let’s explain a scenario so for example if you’re based in San Fransisco, CA. Let’s say this is primarily where all your traffic is coming from. And you purchased a web hosting service with servers out of London. The users that visit your website from San Francisco will have to connect to a server in London before they visit your website. With that situation in hand, you can only imagine the amount of lag time that might be caused by trying to connect to a server halfway across the world.
There are some web hosting companies that actually offer a choice of where you want your primary server to be based. A2Hosting does a great job at this. They give you the choice of choosing servers out of the United States, Australia & United Kingdom, Canada, and France.
Outside of A2Hosting, there are other options you can find online that offer this kind of feature.
Read our review here of a list of the Best Web Hosting Companies to find what company suits you best!
What Are their Pricing and Affordability like?💸
Depending on the level of service your looking for most web hosting companies can accommodate. There’s typically a wide range of pricing, sometimes more competitive than others.
The more accommodating web hosting companies that offer more affordable pricing for beginners are iPage, Hostgator, BlueHost, and A2 Hosting.
These companies offer shared hosting plans with free domains on signup. Pricing for these shared hosting plans can be anywhere from $2 a month to $15 a month. Shared hosting plans are commonly described in an analogy of a pie. Imagine the server is the pie and there are 8 slices. Anyone else who purchases shared hosting also gets a slice of this pie to share with you. So in this scenario, your web hosting company would offer you support and assistance with whatever you need. It’s also very effective for the price.
Although of course if you’re looking to manage bigger websites with more traffic than usual. There are packages that are also commonly offered such as VPS (Virtual Private Server), or Managed Hosting. These kinds of packages are for advanced users looking to manage and maintain their own web hosting. Typically when you use these kinds of packages you are your own support team.
Does the Web Host Specialize in something?✍️
Take a look at your web host to see if they’re specialists. Some Web hosting companies such as WP Engine and WPX only offer WordPress website hosting. So if you have a WordPress website and want to be optimized hosting for the best kind of performance, these companies are the place you want to be.
Other web hosting companies offer different kinds of services for gaming or things of that nature. So make sure to read what they have to offer before purchasing. It might even be a wise decision to ask the support team about what service to use if you’ve never used web hosting before.
If you would like to read our review on all these Website Hosting companies you can individually here: iPage, A2Hosting, BlueHost, Hostgator, WPX, WP Engine, Name Cheap, Kinsta, Nexcess and a few others.
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