Website hosting company or web hosting provider or web host is either an individual or a company that provides space on a server to its clients on lease; this web hosting firm also provides internet connectivity and storage space in a data center. As of now, there are several data centers in India, offering a variety of plans such as shared web hosting, VPS hosting, and dedicated server hosting. This confuses us how to choose best web hosting. Each of these services is appropriate to cater to the needs of different types of clients.
How To Choose Best Web Hosting Solution
As there are numerous web hosting services providers present in the market, it is a difficult task for the customer to choose the service provider that could best fulfill its requirements. Given under are some important points, which if kept in mind while looking for a web host, would help you in choosing a reliable website hosting company:
1. Past Performance: It is an effective criterion while assessing the reliability and credibility of a hosting provider. You should get information about the background of the firm; know for how many years it is active in the industry; and, are there any awards and recognitions that the company has acquired. This kind of analysis gives a good idea about the level of a web hosting company.
2. Uptime: This is a decisive feature in selecting a particular hosting services provider. Uptime in web hosting industry refers to the amount of time a server remains in service in a year; it is basically the total service time, minus the server downtime. The uptime is generally represented in percentage form. A value above 98% is considered good; however, 99.99% is an ideal value for uptime.
3. Flexibility: Flexibility here refers to the freedom of starting from a minimum or lower plan in the beginning and later upgrading to a higher hosting plan as and when the need arises. The web hosts who provide such kind of flexibility are considered much better than those having rigid hosting plan structure.
4. Cost and Features: While choosing between the different web hosting firms, you should make a careful comparison of cost and features provided by various web hosts. See whether the features offered are matching your needs or not; also, ensure that all the basic features are covered and latest technologies are available. You might not be requiring the advanced technologies, but seeing if a web host is offering them or not is an effective way to know the reliability of the service provider.
5. Payment Plans: It is necessary to carefully go through the service plans of a web hosting provider. A plan with monthly payment option is preferable because in it the option for changing the plan or provider remains open with the client. Some web hosts also provide 30 days money back guarantee nowadays, along with complementary services.
6. Support: Support is a very important factor in determining the reliability of a website hosting company. You should enquire from what all modes a web host is providing support, for example, support through phone, email, online support, etc. Also, get information about the response time. A firm that offers 24×7 customer support is the best.
7. Backup: Backup is crucial for the safety of data, in case there would be loss of data due to some reason or the other. Critical organizational data is essential for the continuation and growth of a business; if this is lost due to some reason, it would become almost impossible for an organization to recover from this loss. So, it is always expected from a web host that he should have provision of data backup.
We are sure that this blog post will help you to choose best web hosting solution.
This article is written by Mohul Ghosh. He is a writer and online marketer at Go4Hosting which is an established web hosting solutions firm, operating in the industry for over a decade.
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Good article, Mohul. This will be a good guide for all beginners looking to start their own website.
Great tips mohul and which hosting service do you recommend to HostLater readers ?
Which pack mate? Shared or VPS or Dedicated or Cloud? 🙂
I don’t understand somnthieg, maybe someone can explain I understand that a cloud setup can balance between servers, by that I understand that it balances things like requests and ram usage, but how is the database thing done? For example a visitor logs in to a high traffic site, it can have 1000 servers but it still needs to read the user’s user/pass from one db location, right? Or maybe the different servers keeps copies of the database synchronised non-stop? How does this work^ ?