Maybe you want to set up a personal blog for your friends to read at any time of the day.
Perhaps you want to bring your business to a whole new level and came to the wonderous place known as the internet to advertise your products and services to the world.
Then the question comes: Where can I host my website?
More often than not, people who first come online searching for a place to host their website stumble upon offers that just seem out of this world - unlimited bandwidth, more disk space than you will ever need, and the unbelievablely low price for these features. Without the technical know-how and understanding of how web hosting works, many then meet with the tragedies that follow - data loss, profits reduced and even online business failures.
Finding a good host is not about the price, as you will know if you are technically sound. Hardware nowadays are all on par and almost all, if not all of the hosts in the world have hardly any difference when it comes to the servers. Technology has reached a such a high level where there is simply no need for anything better, and what matters now is the ability of the web hosts to solve any problems that you might have as an when you need it.
When looking for a good web host, see if they provide 24-hour support and then proceed onto checking the response rate by sending a ticket with a question and seeing how long it takes for them to reply. The reason for this is simple - you want to get help as quickly as possible if you encounter any problems, or if the host has any problems.
Another thing you should look out for are the testimonials the host has, especially those that are at least a few years old. If a successful website has been hosted at the same place for years, you can be sure that it is reliable as the customer would have already left if the host wasn’t good.
Cheap web hosting offered by a good company is often better than expensive plans that are run by business people who know nothing about computers. The best way to tell is by other people’s success stories, because they represent the real-world capabilities of the web hosting company.
Cheap web hosting services are usually hard to judge, especially if the website has a very professional appearance. As the saying goes, never judge a book by its cover. Fortunately, there are ways around this blindness, and several methods exist which you can use to tell if the cheap web hosting plan you are considering is good.
1. The Technical Support Test
Send a support ticket or e-mail with a query to the web host during a weekend and take note of the time they took to respond to your question. If the response time was under 3 hours, it is considered to be good enough and it means that your website will be attended to within that timeframe if you were to encounter any problems. However, you should also note the quality of the reply to see if they are technically excellent. Many hosting companies do not hire reliable employees and this usually results in unanswered and unsolved problems that just drag on throughout your contract with the company.
2. The Website Speed Test
If the web hosting company’s website loads slowly, you can be quite sure that yours will to if you choose to let them serve your website. Cheap web hosting companies usually reduce costs by putting everyone on the same server and same connection, causing heavy congestion of both the processor and data line, which results in longer load times for the website. This is a huge turn-off for people who visit your site and according to a study, 4 seconds is the maximum time someone will wait before they leave and 75% will never intend to go back to your website ever again.
3. The Features Test
Look at the features of the web host and determine whether another person that would be on your server has the ability to abuse any feature that will jeopardize everyone else. If it is unlimited bandwidth, someone could use it to host popular and big files that will cause the connection to slow down for everyone on the server, resulting in slow websites that drive visitors away. If there is unlimited disk space, the abuser could fill it up with huge files such as DVDs and eventually fill up the whole disk, leading to errors that will affect the files of everyone else.
Your website loads within 1 second for any visitor that comes in, and it accomodates 1000 visitors each day with server-intensive scripts running each time a visitor goes to your website. This is what a good web hosting company can handle, even if it is cheap web hosting they are providing you.
Cheap web hosting does not mean that the hardware is inferior. In fact, cheap web hosting servers are usually more powerful than dedicated ones as the web hosting companies accomodate more people into every one of these servers, allowing them to spend more and still get a profit out of it. The only problem is when each website on the same server uses up more processing power or bandwidth than the expected average, resulting in slower load times for all the websites on that particular server.
A good host will be able to cope with these problems. As long as the web hosting company has competent, technically technically excellent people working for them, you should be able to count on their ability to fix your problems as and when they do happen. Even if they do not do it automatically, having a good team behind the servers will ensure that you get proper assistance when you encounter any difficulties.
Certain web hosts have technology that allows their servers to share any workload in terms of bandwidth and processing power, which are much better than most expensive virtual-dedicated or dedicated web hosting plans in most cases. The combined powers of these servers will further ensure that coincidental misfortunes of having too many server-intensive websites on one particular server is not a problem, and the website that operates above average levels will stand to gain since they will be using more for less.
Cheap web hosting can be good if you choose the right web host. Hardware limits is not so much the issue, as you have learnt, when it comes to web hosting and it is more about how the web host maintains their servers to ensure that everyone gets a sufficient amount of bandwidth and disk space dedicated to them for their websites to function.
Cheap web hosting is not hard to find if you know where to get the right unbiased unformation about the web hosting providers out there. Having an edge in technical knowhow will also help you see certain things that will allow you to judge a good web host from a bad one. Here, we will talk about a few things you can do that will help you verify if a cheap web hosting plan you are getting is reliable.
1. Forums
Use google to search for the term “[web host name] review” without the quotes and you should see some results with people’s experiences with the host. If there aren’t any, it means that the host is too new, or simply underused. In this case, ignore the host and move on as you will want a host that has already proven themselves to be competent. The best place for reviews are usually forums, because these are most of the time unbiased and written by people who just want to help others decide on which host to choose. Other websites usually review it to promote it so they can earn commissions off your purchase and there is usually a bias there.
2. Uptime
Look for the uptime of the web host’s servers that is usually mentioned on their website. If it isn’t, pass on the web host; if they do not think this is important enough to include, it means that they do not know well enough. 99.5% or more is what you should be looking at when it comes to uptime.
3. Support
Test the support capabilities of the cheap web hosting provider by sending in your questions and using the time they took to respond and the quality of the response, you can decide on whether they are good enough to take on your website. This is one of the most important factors and what differentiates the good web hosts from the bad ones.
Armed with these information, you can now tell whether a web hosting company is good and get your website hosted without any worries.
What are the differences that set the price gap between cheap and expensive web hosting?
Before you consider getting a cheap web hosting plan, know what you can expect from paying less for the service and find out if your situation will require the extra benefits that more expensive web hosting plans have. Personal websites for instance, will need less bandwidth than business websites that will sell products. Here is are two of the differences.
1. Allocation of the Server’s Physical Hardware Capacity
Expensive web hosting usually ensures that you get a substantial part of the hardware to your website, meaning you are always ensured a certain level of speed for a certain amount of visitors. This will prevent anyone sharing the same server as you from causing your website any loading problems.
Cheap web hosting on the other hand does not control this factor and it usually ends up slow for everyone just because a few people are using most of the server’s resources. If your website does not have anything on the line that would require a fast response rate all the time, it is usually sufficient as you will get enough most of the time for your website serving needs.
2. Technical Support
When you sign up for expensive web hosting, you are often paying for the services of a professional support team which can ensure that you server is never down for more than a few hours. Whenever there are problems, you will get direct assistance and get the solutions solved within a short amount of time. This is especially importnat for online businesses because it’s basically all it has and there would be no business without a website.
If you have a personal non-profit website that can survive with a day or two of downtime every once in awhile, cheap web hosting will suffice. You will not need such comprehensive technical support and of course, won’t need to pay for expertise that you will not be using.
These are two of the more important points to take note to decide between cheap and expensive web hosting. Most people will only ever need the features of cheap web hosting, so don’t be fooled by those who fluff up expensive web hosting with things that you do not even need.
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