Factors to consider before buying a web hosting
- Written by Steve Kowal
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Below you will find some of the most important factors when choosing a shared hosting. Start with your website. If it is brand new and has no visitors, if you are going to write a personal blog with not much data on it or a simple portfolio, the shared hosting is for you. Then think of how many visitors you will have per month. Most shared hostings will be good for you if you have up to 15000 visitors on your site per month. Don't fall for the unlimited features they offer. On shared hosting you will see that even if your space and bandwidth are unlimited, the processor time and ram and inodes are, and they will cap your site if you have many visitors.
Most big players on the web hosting market are the same. When choosing shared hosting, the most important factors should be uptime and speed of delivery of the servers. How close are the datacenters to your visitors? How good is the support? How fast and friendly they resolve your issues. And of course how much it costs. Below you can find some other factors that you should consider when choosing a shared web hosting.
Choosing the best website hosting checklist
- make a list with trustworthy web host companies that you want to check - you can use our top website hosting reviews list.
- web hosting location - you would want UK/Europe based data center(much faster data delivery) and UK/Europe english speaking inhouse support (they are in your time zone and can solve your problems faster)
- website hosting speed - speed is everything. The faster the site, more traffic and conversions and more income to your business. That's why you need local hosting, and test their Ping and page speed load time, Google recommends server response time under 200ms. Website Speed is a ranking factor as well.
- web host security - do they provide isolated accounts, firewalls and auto updates of CMS like WordPress and Joomla
- data backup - everything happens. Your data is the most important part of your business and you can accidentally delete something or get infected by virus. Your web hosting service needs to have a backup!
- read web hosting reviews by experts (you can grasp the insight from people with experience, but keep in mind that they also are affiliated with the hosting providers, so don't take the review 100%)
- read reviews by customers - browse around the web and find customer reviews of the chosen webhost company. Also don't trust that 100% since there are paid reviews and there are hate reviews.
Technical
How reliable is the hosting? You should look for hosting providers that offer at least 99% uptime, 99,5% is even better. Also if they offer some guarantee about that uptime.
Data transfer and disk space. Don't fall for the unlimited disk space and traffic offers, there is always something limited, unless you are not paying for dedicated servers. Read the fine print regarding those limitations. You might not have need for a lot of space in the beginning, but for a shared hosting, you will not be allowed to host streaming video or audio.
Data centers? You will need a hosting that has a data center (where the servers are physically located) as close to your visitors as possible, because that will ensure faster data transfer. This is good for user experience and SEO.
How secure is your data? You will have to look for info if the hosting provide data backups, how often, if they are free or paid? This is important in case something happen with your site due to malicious access or accidental deletion of information. Its always good to have a backup!
E-mail? This is important one. How many emails the hosting provides? Is there space limitations? Do they offer email for all your domains hosted on the account or just one?
Technologies. Do they support the basic scripts that you might need for your site. Those include PHP, MySQL, .htaccess, Perl, crontabs. How often are those updated, because you might need the latest versions for your application or CMS.
Support
This is very important factor. If something happens, how fast the hosting company can fix the issue? Do they have phone, live chat or email support? How fast is that support? Is it supported by SysAdmins or is it outsourced? Do they have 24/7 support? Do not buy a hosting that can not provide 24/7 support by qualified personal. You can test that before purchasing the hosting account by trying to call the hosting or email them at night and see if someone with techical knowledge will answer to your questions.
Price
Another important factor is the price. Look on yearly basis. Some hosting promote their prices on 3 year plans and they look much cheaper, but on a year plan it looks very differently. Also, make sure they offer Money Back Guaranteed and for how long they offer that option. This is a good thing since you can be sure you test the hosting and if you dont like any of the other factors above, you can cancel the subscription and get you money.
In our reviews we have tried to answer to those questions by asking directly the hosting companies, so you can read those reviews and make the best decision on which hosting company suits your needs. You can check the reviews from our homepage with the table of the best uk hostings or you can always contact us and share your opinion about a hosting company or ask a question.
