Web hosting services are the backbone of your website. That’s why you should choose them with extreme care, to ensure they’ll support all the traffic your site gets. They have to be fast, secure and reliable, while offering enough resources and bandwidth so that you won’t run into any issues with your website’s performance or downtime (or lack thereof). With so many web hosting providers out there, it can be tricky to select the right one, even if you’re not sure what kind of service you need at first.
The art of choosing web hosting services
Web hosting is an important part of owning a website. It’s how your site will be accessible to others on the internet. There are many different web hosting companies out there, and it can be hard to know which one to choose. Here are a few things to keep in mind when choosing a web hosting company:
- The type of website you have (or plan to have)
- Your budget
- The features you need
- The company’s reputation – Customer service
- Speed of the server
- Server location
- The company’s plans for upgrades and future growth
- Additional services offered by the company (email, domain registration, storage space) – Whether or not they offer tech support, tutorials or other tools to help you with the process
- What data center the company uses
- How long has the company been around?
- Who provides the actual physical hosting for their servers?
- What payment methods do they accept? – Do they provide refunds? If so, what are the terms of the refund policy?
- Are there any hidden fees or costs I should be aware of before signing up?
- Is customer service available 24/7, 365 days a year?
- Is customer service just email only, or does the company offer phone customer service as well as live chat options?
- Does the company offer any free trial periods to test out their hosting before signing up for an account? – What kind of SLA guarantee does the company offer if something goes wrong?
- Can you pay month-to-month or yearly instead of committing to a contract term?
- Is there anything else I should be looking for when comparing web hosting providers? – With these factors in mind, we have provided reviews of some popular web hosting companies below.
- HostGator offers various plans that include beginner plans, business class plans and more advanced enterprise level ones.
- Bluehost’s most basic option starts at $4.95 per month with unlimited domains and disk space and 24/7 customer service access via phone, email or live chat. Their most expensive option starts at $249 per month for high volume websites like online shopping malls or sites that receive over 2 million visitors per day. They also offer hosting packages designed specifically for ecommerce, blogs, personal websites and small businesses.
- DreamHost is another provider that offers great prices starting at $5.95 per month but doesn’t offer ecommerce hosting packages. However, they do allow users to install WordPress or Drupal through their Softaculous auto installer and Softaculous scripts library.
- GoDaddy’s lowest priced plan starts at $2.49 per month with the price increasing depending on additional needs such as bandwidth or disk space needed by the user – this makes them a good choice for those who may require additional resources later down the line but don’t want to commit to a longer term commitment from the get go.