How to Choose Web Hosting Service

Choosing a web hosting service among thousands of providers can be a hard thing for the majority of webmasters at present. They already know that a bad hosting service coming with frequent downtime, security issues, and poor technical support can be a nightmare, but still find no way out for a quality option.

In this case, we’d like to list some tips concerning about how to choose web hosting service, with which you can narrow down your choices and weed out unreliable options with ease.

Make Sure Web Hosting is Your Target Hosting Type

First, when you’re looking for hosting a website, you shall know that share web hosting is your right hosting type. In fact, there are actually 3 major types of hosting solutions: shared web hosting, VPS hosting, and dedicated server. According to our investigations, share hosting is most suited for small or medium sized sites that do not need too much disk space and bandwidth, coming with the traffic under 2,000 page views or 1,000 unique visitors daily. If your requirement exceeds this limit, you’d better forgo this option and look for VPS or dedicated hosting.

Think about the Price and Evaluate Budget

In fact, the price of web hosting is relatively low as compared with other types of hosting solutions. This is because you need to share the server resources of a single machine with many other users, thus the fees you need to pay for the physical server is partially.

Due to this fact, there are so many extremely cheap or even free web hosts available. Honestly, we don’t recommend you going with these companies, for they often offer limited features, frequent website crashes, and upset page loading speed, with which you may end up experiencing a terrible hosting service.

Some other web hosts offer expensive hosting solutions claiming to guarantee quality and reliable services. If your budget can cope with these charges, you can opt for them. Otherwise, you’d better choose some options that are able to offer top-level web hosting solution at an affordable price.

Estimate the Server Resources You Need

After considering the budget, you have to calculate your disk space and bandwidth usage. Generally, web hosts will claim that they offer unlimited disk storage and data transfer. However, if you use too many server resources thus negatively impact the experience of other customers, you may face some penalty from your web hosts.

In this circumstance, you have to estimate how much volume of server resources you will need to build your site, as well as read the bandwidth and disk space terms to know the largest allocation that can be offered by your web hosting provider.

Check the Data Center and Server Utilized by This Company

In fact, the reduced level of security and performance are the most noticeable disadvantages of shared web hosting. After all, you are sharing the same physical servers with many other people. If an amateur causes some kinds of chaos on the shared server, and you are not proficient at development language, your websites can be left insecure, offering intruders a gateway to your data. Or, if your neighborhoods have consumed too much CPU, RAM and disk I/O usage, then your websites are likely to encounter issues of performance and reliability.

In this case, the quality and highly-configured servers along with the world-class data centers play a vital role. Therefore, before choosing a web host, you’d better find some information about its data center and web servers. Generally, a good web host that succeeds in guaranteeing no downtime, swift hosting speed and a high level of security utilizes the quality and robust Dell servers, and locates these servers at data centers featuring redundant power supply, best cooling system, advanced security measures, and 24/7 monitoring.

Check the Add-ons or Extra Benefits of the Web Host

Different web hosts may offer different add-ons or extra benefits. You can consider them and choose the web host based on your needs. However, the following listed features are highly recommended. If you find a web host offering them, you can give it a prior consideration.

The web host offers some advanced programming languages such as the latest version of PHP, Ruby on Rails, Shell (SSH) Access, SSL, Perl, Python, MySQL, and many more.
The company provides at least 30 days money back guarantee. 30-day refund is the minimum guarantee in the shared web hosting industry, and an anytime money back is even more preferred.
The service provider offers the cPanel control panel, with which you can easily manage domain name, websites, email, files, and databases, etc.
The web host offers a free domain name. Here, you need to read the related terms at first. After all, the free domain offered by some web hosts is only valid for the first year of registration, but not life-time available.
The web host offers regular backup on a daily basis, with which you can restore your site normally with the backup files once your site has been hacked by malicious intruders, and some valuable data has been deleted or destroyed.

Check the Support Review

Everyone might encounter some technical issues no matter you are a newbie or a professional. Therefore, before purchasing a web hosting service, you have to make sure that this company is able to offer responsive technical support 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Besides, the support channel should be various, giving you multiple choices to contact support staffs. The most basic and commonly used support methods are hotline, ticket system, e-mail, live chat, and Q&A section.

Billing & Money Back Guarantee

The majority of web hosting companies apply the price to billing circle. Therefore, if you want to purchase with a cheaper price, you can sign up with a longer billing period. However, if you are a beginner just wishing to have a try, then you’d better choose a web host that offers monthly billing circle, and purchase the hosting for a short time.

Before choosing a web host, you have to make sure whether this company offers trusted money back guarantee. If the answer is right, then you’d better read the Terms and Services to learn the related information like nonrefundable fees and refund period. In fact, almost all the web hosts claim to offer money back guarantee, but only a few of them refund you when you cancel the account.

Top 3 Shared Web Hosting

Without doubt, you can find a truly reliable web host based on the tips mentioned above. However, you may still feel a chore to make choices among a tremendous number of companies all over the world. To eliminate this burden, we have listed the top 3 web hosts which are trusted and recommended by many webmasters and review sites. All of them provide hosting services coming with the most budget-friendly price, outstanding performance, quality customer service, and beneficial extras.

#1 BlueHost

BlueHost has been awarded as one of the best web hosts all over the world, starting at $3.49/mo for customers going through this special promotion link .

In order to provide customers with the highest level of reliability and security, this company has constantly innovated and upgraded their services at no additional cost to their customers. For instance, it has spent millions of dollars building their own top-class data centers, fiber network and custom Linux kernel to ensure customers an excellent hosting experience, ie, 100% uptime and 320ms for server response.

Besides, it also developed the cutting-edge CPU and I/O Segregation technology and has released it since 2010. With it, customers no longer need to worry about the security, page loading speed, and uptime of their sites been affected by abusive neighborhoods who consume too many server resources.

#2 InMotion Hosting

The price of InMotion is quite affordable, starting at $3.49/mo with the exclusive promotional link. Besides the cheap rate, this company also offers all the features and add-ons needed to host website successfully.

When it comes to the support, InMotion offers a primer technical support, helping customers get the best assistance at the shortest time period.

#3 HostGator

HostGator is a world-wide shared web hosting provider founded in 2002. As a veteran in this industry, HostGator has already known the importance of increasing the level of web hosting security and reliability and has cooperated with primary data centers for the best uptime track record. These world-class datacenters contain the latest advanced technologies to ensure that each server can be on-line all the time.