How to Choose the Best Hosting Provider from your Own Business Perspective
Linux Hosting Features
There are several things you should take into account when choosing a hosting company.
- Reliability and Uptime
- Disk Storage
- Bandwidth
- Security
- Backup
- Flexibility
- Support
- Price
Let's take it one by one and see exactly what each above item means.
Reliability & Uptime: This the ability of the hosting company to provide stable, fault tolerant infrastructure with good uptimes. Most web hosting companies say they offer 99.9% uptimes, but this is not true for all of them. In other words uptime means the percentage of time that the host is accessible via internet. And as I previously mentioned, most say they offer 99.9%, but sometimes the server may suffer some restarts and planned or unpllanned maintenance. This usually happens in any web hosting environment.
Disk Storage: Depending on how larger your site is, you may pick up a more or less storage. If you have a basic site and need about 10 to 20 email accounts then you do not need more than 1GB of disk storage. However if you intend to conect your email address with Outlook, and you do no want to keep messages on your server but only on your local computer, then there will be more free space available. Please see more details on choosing hosting package which best fits your site and business.
Bandwidth: Bandwidth, called also data transfer, is the amount of traffic allowed from and to your site and the rest of the internet. If your site site has large traffic then you would need more bandwidth. You can read more details on how to choose a hosting package
Security: A secure hosting server means that the server uses latest technologies and software, scanning systems and networks for disallowing hackers, invaders or spammers to create server issues.
Backup: In the last years, there are many hosting companies offering backups, monthly, weekly or daily, to websites and database installed on their server.
Flexibility: This is when you have a small site, you buy in the first year a small package hosting, and then, after your online business grows and site becomes larger and with higher traffic, you need to upgrade to a better hosting package, with larger disk storage and bandwidth. You should be able to do this change without any issue from the hosting company, and with minimum downtime for your site.
Support: You always should rely an good support, by email, chat or phone from your hosting company. They should answer you in maximum 48h to your questions, and their 'answer' should be easy to understand and useful for you.
Price: The last but not the least is the price for the hosting package. Read, compare and then decide upon what you should buy. Take care that many times, the cheaper does not mean the best.
How to check Hosting Company Services
There are multiple ways of checking the quality of the services provided by the hosting company from which you intend to buy their services.
One way to check the features listed on the left hand side is to check their testimonials, on their site or better on a neutral site. And you can see there what other clients hosted on their servers have to say about the hosting services.
Another good solution is some referral you may have, from friends for example or other people from the internet, that used their services for a longer period, let's say more than 6 months.
It's not very difficult to find a good host, but you should be aware that most of the biggest hosting companies usually overestimates their 'services', buy saying "we offer you unlimited disk space" or "we offer you unlimited bandwidth". Usually this is not true in shared hosting case. In dedicated hosting case may be true. But in shared hosting, if they mention they offer let's say 500 GB disk storage, and one wants to upload his personal stuff on their server, which is not the website, then next day all his personal stuff may be deleted. And this is usually specified in the "Terms and Condition" document. Usually they state in the document that the server can be used for website purpose and not for other type of documents.
Smaller Hosting Companies can offer better services than the big hosting companies. A simple reason would be that big hosting companies has thousands, hundred of thousands or even millions of clients, very hard to manage with. Moreover, no matter if they have many servers, usually their servers maybe overloaded, and due to this reason, the server may crash easier and often. Or in better cases it may result in your website loading time, which can decrease significantly.
Also take into account if the hosting company offers free installation and/or setup for your site.
Before taking the final decision, just browse some websites hosted on that specific server(s) and see how fast the web pages load. This will give you an idea of how speedy their servers are.