How to choose a quality hosting provider for your website?

The uptime and performance of a website depends significantly on efficient operation of the web hosting company without any downtime issues. Hosting companies do claim many things to attract customers initially but find it difficult to hold on to their promises for long term because of some inefficiencies that creep in over time. Sometimes they bait customers with special offers such as unlimited bandwidth, disk space etc at the expense of other vital features. It is not a good idea to judge hosting companies and come to conclusions right away by looking at their price and assertions. Instead, there are certain factors that need to be thoroughly investigated before deciding the service for a given hosting plan.

Type of hosting plan

Many people go with the shared hosting plans instead of dedicated because it is a cost effective option for small websites with moderate web traffic. There is nothing wrong in choosing this option except that it has some limitations in hosting resources, which can impact the working of their websites when hosted along with other sites on the same server. The result could be more downtimes, low uptime numbers and poor site performance because of the lack of adequate server resources.

Is the Hosting provider – Reseller or Primary?

While shared and VPS are typical choices for small and medium businesses, reseller is another cheap hosting option that people can easily get attracted to, because of its flexible service and reduced cost. Resellers generally purchase host services from the primary company and sell them to the customers on commission basis. Since they are not the primary hosts, they typically cannot provide adequate amount of support as required by the customers. To save a few bucks on the hosting plans, some website owners accept these cheaper hosting services and unnecessarily put their businesses at stake.

Ease of usability

For server administration and website managing activities, hosting companies provide their users with CPanel where they can manage their file directories, email accounts, domains, software installations etc. People who are just starting out and getting used to website management, might find it difficult to manage the CPanel if it is too complicated. Here they will be spending more time on figuring out various Cpanel features rather than concentrating on their real job. Hence, while deciding a web host, make sure to choose the company that has latest version of cpanel with user friendly interface.

Reliability of hosting

A high price tag may not always guarantee a quality product. This is true in hosting as well because choosing a highly priced plan may not assure a quality service. While searching for a web host it is better not to put cost as primary criteria to find a provider. Instead, try to look for the company that is reliable and has a good track record of supporting their customers with quality service. Look into the reviews and see if the provider has any downtime issues or customer complaints against it and check if they are fair in keeping their promises on website performance and uptime. While a good service provider will indeed keep our websites up and running without any outages, sometimes website owners have alternative backup plans and sign up for uptime monitoring services to keep track of their site functionality.

Facilitating the customers

When reviewing the web host services you will notice each service provider facilitate their customers with different utilities. While some are focused on security tools like anti-spam and anti-malware, others offer convenient packages to design e-commerce websites with shopping cart and site builder application features. When it comes to server operating systems, many providers give Linux as the default option, whereas few others offer a choice between Windows & Linux hosting. Hence, before committing to any hosting service, it is worth spending some time to research on providers to ensure the host that you have selected will have the capability to scale up their services as your business grows.

Uptime statistics

Uptime is a great measure that decides how good the hosting provider is at avoiding the downtime and keeping the websites up and running. None of the above features are equivalent to the website uptime because if the site is down, your clients or customers will be doing business with your competitors. It directly translates into poor impression on your website and significant loss in sales & business revenues. All in all, a consistent check on the uptime statistics is important which is only possible with a good website monitoring service, to quickly identify the problems connecting to your websites or services and take action immediately.

Alertra is a leading provider of website monitoring and alerting services. We monitoring service uptime and check availability and performance of Internet-connected devices.