Choosing a Web Hosting Service plays a vital part in a website’s success. With different providers having different plans and packages it can get really difficult for you to choose one. Let me help you with it.
There are different types of hosting – Dedicated Hosting, VPS Hosting, Shared Hosting and the most recent and popular one is the elastic Cloud Hosting.
Requirement Analysis
First step is to analyze your requirement, for eg., You want to host a blog or a single static website for promoting your business, a shared hosting with a dedicated IP would be an appropriate choice. But again if your business is a big corporation, I suggest you use a higher hosting standard like a Dedicated Server which will come with more flexible control over your server and will have higher resources compared to Shared Hosting or VPS Hosting.
If you are planning to start an e-commerce portal and have a limited budget, you can use shared hosting with a dedicated IP address and a Private SSL Certificate for more security. Shared hosting is not ideal for e-commerce since the application needs a lot of resources for functioning fast and reliably which is not offered by Shared Hosting. So I would recommend using this only if you are expecting small number of visitors per day say 150. If your number of visitors increase to a great extent, the account starts consuming more resources and once it reaches the maximum limit the hosting account gets temporarily suspended(Site is offline). Once you reach this mark(around 15 visitors/day), please upgrade to a VPS since an Offline website is not an option for an e-commerce portal.
Shared Hosting with Unlimited Bandwidth and Disk Space can also be used as an Update server for an application with small user-base.
Beware of Unlimited Hosting Plans
Now-a-days every hosting company has an Unlimited Hosting plan, but is it really Unlimited?
No! It isn’t except for bandwidth, disk space, email accounts, parked domains, addon domains and sub domains maybe even MySQL databases. Sure its an important factor but for handling all these in a truly unlimited manner requires unlimited CPU resource. The companies limit each account to only 25-30% of total resource usage. As soon as your account exceeds the number your account is suspended which makes your website unavailable to users.
Scalability
Some web applications have situation where sometimes the resources required by the application may exceed for small period of time. Now if that application is hosted on a VPS or a Dedicated Server, it is not possible to scale the server automatically at run-time i.e., without taking it offline. This is where Elastic Cloud Hosting comes to rescue. In this type of hosting, the server automatically scales as the requirement is increased or decreased and the user ends up paying only for the “actual” resource usage without any extra charge. That means if the website uses less HDD Space, Bandwidth, Memory and CPU you need to pay less and if the usage increases you need to pay a bit more than average.
Because of the flexibility that Cloud Hosting provides, its my personal favorite. It is suitable for all kinds of application from small to large.
Operating System
Operating System is the most critical part when it comes to choosing a hosting service. If you are running an ASP application I suggest you go with Windows Hosting since Linux won’t support ASP. If you are planning on hosting a static website in HTML or a dynamic PHP website, you should go with Linux as PHP/MySQL are open source technologies that run without any issues on Linux. Since you don’t need to purchase any license for the OS, its is cost effective too.
If you are buying a VPS or Dedicated Hosting and you are not familiar with Linux environment, please go with Windows since I find it very much user friendly for remote access.
Uptime
Look for an uptime guarantee of 99.9%, any downtime is bad as your site will simply not be available and you will lose visitors – maybe permanently.
Technical Support
If you experience urgent problems you want help immediately. You should therefore expect support to be available 24/7 by telephone, not just by email.
30 Days Money Back Guarantee
Not a “must have” feature to look for but if you are choosing a newly formed web hosting company look for this guarantee.
Other general features
Other general features you should look for are:
Control Panel(Cpanel/Plesk)
FTP Accounts
Shell Access
phpMyAdmin
Web Mail
SMTP/POP 3 Support
Domain Name Control Panel
File Manager
Also don’t forget to check reviews of various Web Hosting providers if you are still confused a lot.
Reviews will help you a lot in deciding which one to choose.
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