How to Choose the Best Web Hosting?
In this article I will help you find the best web hosting for your personal blog or business website. If you are looking for the best web hosting, please read this article. Here you will find very useful tips on how to choose a reliable hosting service. I’ve also included reviews of my favorite hosting providers at the end of this article.
Nowadays, if you are a head of a company that doesn’t have online presence, then you should seriously consider your business model. People buy lots of stuff online and if you don’t show your services and products to them via a neatly designed website, then you are simply losing money.
Even if you are leading a traditional business, wouldn’t it be nice if people find your site on the Internet? They either locate and go to your store or look up your number and call you to demand your service; in the end it’s great for your business in both ways.
What most of us do when we need something is that we sit down to our laptop or pick up our phones and use search engines to find us the store and agency we need. That’s how new customers find your business. Don’t make it difficult for them to find you, launch your website instead.
But first, you need to pick the web host that mostly suits your needs. These are companies that secure a reliable service for you by storing your content on their servers and making it accessible to anyone who wants to see your site.
Choosing between these web hosting providers can be a tricky question. The services and prices can differ in many ways, so it’s important to gather information first and consider your business goals before you make your decision.
Free hosting services are also an option, but then your website will be full of ads which can be quite annoying for you and your viewers as well. If you want to be able to fully control and uniquely present your content, you should definitely try a premium option.
Now let’s dive into the world of web hosting and go through the most important points.
Start with Shared Hosting
A dedicated server is often too expensive or simply too much for your needs. You don’t necessarily need a whole server for your site if there are some decent providers available that offer plans for shared hosting as well. It’s a perfect option if you are not familiar with web hosting services and want to launch your first website.
It’s a pretty good choice if you want to keep a tight budget, as these usually cost around $5 each month. You won’t get as much control by renting a shared server as with the dedicated or VPS one, but those cost hundreds of dollars, so it’s a completely different category.
Many shared hosting providers offer dedicated hosting as well and vice versa. You can consider their shared hosting plans an opportunity to test their services. Most of these offer quite generous money back guarantees as well, giving you some space to change your decision without any investment.
However, if you want to start small and their services are satisfying to you, then you should invest in one of their longer plans since you will get a significant discount. Even if you have enough money for a dedicated server, it’s hard to tell right away whether you need that big of a storage or not.
Not to mention the various professional features and control that you get for your money. The reason why shared hosting is such a smart idea is that you can start off with your first website while many other users have their own smaller sites on the same server.
They all pay for the hosting, keeping it really cheap while the server can still run easily without complications. On the other hand, shared hosting really pays off for the providers since there are always users who will demand their dedicated hosting service as well in the future.
Test Customer Support
It can happen at any time that you’re working on your website, suddenly run into a problem and you just don’t know how to solve it. Without a customer support, it can be really hard to find a proper fix. Of course, not everyone is a skilled IT guy, so you need to find one as soon as possible.
This is why making sure that a web hosting service has a helpful and responsive customer support is so crucial. After starting a new website, it needs to be somehow guaranteed that it won’t crash or let you down in any way in the long run.
A quick helping hand, a powerful community or at least a comprehensive knowledge base has to be available at all times at a hosting provider if they want to call themselves a whole. By paying for their services, you are a customer that deserves that attention.
There are many hosting companies that happily accept your money, but still only spend the bare minimum on their customer support section. When you start searching for potential web hosting providers, you should check their knowledge base and forums.
If you mostly see low scores and complaints about their customer support or even additional signs that indicate unsolved customer issues, then you should certainly choose another company instead. An unresponsive team can quickly earn them a bad reputation.
On our list of web hosts, you can find some of the biggest names with customer supports you can actually count on. You can tell if a provider properly invests in helping out their clients and keeping up a support that is constantly available. It’s like an indicator that shows whether we are talking about a serious team or not.
When looking for the best web hosting provider, make sure that they care about your success and not just your money.
Research Reliability & Uptime
These are two additional reasons why you should read more about web hosting options before making a choice. It’s easy to give your money to a provider just because they offer a plethora of awesome extras for low prices, but what if you suddenly start experiencing unexpected issues that only hinder your progress?
You need to consider the current budget that you are willing to invest and how much uptime and reliability does it equal to. If you want cheaper options, you can find them right away and they will get you online as well, but don’t be surprised if their servers are bad and they barely offer any support.
No need to worry, there are numerous web hosts available that are affordable and reliable. There are even big names with many years of experience that offer shared hosting options with outstanding uptime stats and tons of satisfied customers.
When it comes to reliability, there are some really important factors to consider. Firstly, a reliable provider should be financially strong and equipped with a top-notch hardware. Also, most of them keep track of their uptime from the year they started and if you see a number there that is more than 99%, then you are fine.
A good web hosting service needs to be secured physically as well and to have a disaster recovery plan that guarantees your data back even if something critical happens. You can expect all this information to be written on a web host’s website so you can get more familiar with their offers and decide whether to join or not.
We are going to show you three greatly successful web hosting providers that already have a long track record of success. They offer the highest possible uptime and you can count on them at any time.
Analyze Guarantees, Policies & Terms
When checking a particular host, always look for the guarantees section and take a look at their list. It usually emphasizes their money back guarantee, which is great, and also their high uptime stats. These are two of the most essential guarantees you look for.
Of course, money back guarantees can vary between 7 and 90 days, but we can say that most web hosts refund within 30 days which is solid. Other than that, you should look for web hosts that guarantee their uptime and a 24/7 support, and both of these are crucially important for maintaining a serious website.
Additionally, a good provider has to make it clear that they store your data securely and won’t use it in any way. Their terms and conditions need to be stated clearly in a separate document or page and also add a glossary where you can find the meaning of unfamiliar words.
Make sure that they have a proper backup so you can lie back confidently knowing that your content won’t be lost even if the servers accidentally crash during your work. You can also read more about the infrastructure of web hosts to ensure yourself that your data is safe and secured.
Best Web Hosts for Beginners & Small Businesses
There are too many hosting companies you can choose from. I’ve tried many, and I always like to go with the best, even if they might be a little bit more expensive. But how expensive can get a reliable hosting service? Actually, professional web hosting is not expensive. Indeed, some of the top and most reliable hosting providers offer their starter packages for under $5 / month.
Do you think it is hard to find a good hosting? I will help you to choose the best web hosting. Bellow you can find a quick overview of my favorite hosting providers that I use all the time:
1. BlueHost
If you search for web hosting providers on Google, BlueHost will be one of them that immediately pop up in the results. They started with shared hosting back in 1996, but now you can choose WordPress hosting, VPS and dedicated servers as well.
BlueHost keeps up a really high standard when it comes to their services, no wonder that they were the winning choice for millions of website owners. They greatly improved their services especially in the past few years, ensuring a great user experience even for the complete beginner.
As a highly successful hosting provider, BlueHost is also recommended by the WordPress team. You can add their platform in just a few simple steps, straight from your control panel.
Thanks to their fast servers that they recently upgraded to top-notch machines, your website will load quickly and seamlessly, providing you with a surprisingly good performance as a shared host. There are three different plans available with BlueHost and the prices vary according to how many add-on domains you want.
Unless you want to run several websites effectively at the same time, you should pick either the Basic or the Plus package and end up paying under $6 a month. For more demanding users, there is the Pro package that jumps up to $14.
In case you are experiencing any difficulties, they can be reached by phone, chat, and through email. You can message them whenever you want and they will answer and solve any of your site-specific or tech issues within an hour.
Instead of being too technical, they focused on providing services that are straightforward and suitable for beginners who just want an easy and reliable solution. Considering their prices and that we are talking about a very competitive company, we can say that investing in BlueHost services is a smart choice and you will definitely not regret it.
2. InMotion Hosting
InMotion is another one of the most comprehensive web hosting providers that are currently available. Their services rely on the latest hardware, well-organized and fast support, and many options to choose from depending on your hosting needs.
They started back in 2001 and slowly but surely evolved into a huge company that easily receives the highest scores in most reviews. You can expect a whopping 99,99% uptime by them which can’t be beaten by most other providers.
InMotion also guarantees faster loading times for your website than most of their competitors, gaining significant advantage with their SSD hard drives, a technology that takes data transfer to another level.
There are always top providers who suddenly decide that it’s okay to overbook their servers and allow more websites on them than recommended, hoping that there won’t be a traffic spike on too many sites simultaneously.
Although this boosts their income, it causes some really awkward situations. InMotion never does that, so your website will surely work seamlessly even in days of heavy traffic. They are also really generous, since you can have your money back thanks to their 90-day refund, which is ridiculously big compared to the 30-day average.
They offer free backup, which is another awesome thing because other web hosts usually charge some money for restoring your data. On the other hand, they clearly invest huge amounts of money in providing a decent support which shows that they indeed take their business seriously.
If you are looking to start a Joomla website, or a WordPress blog, with InMotion you can set it up quickly. They offer one-click installation tool, which enables you to choose from over 150 open source software and install them to your website.
InMotion is really responsive through all of their channels when it comes to customer support and their professionals are highly experienced in their field. If you want to just read more into a particular subject, they have a pretty impressive knowledge base with plenty of conversations that can be helpful to you.
If you want to launch and maintain a few websites, InMotion can certainly provide you with top-notch hosting services.
3. HostGator
This provider is launched in 2002 and quickly proved itself as a powerful solution for website hosting. They have a specific plan that lasts 36 months, costing only $4 each month which is a nice offer for those who want to use HostGator long term.
You can save up to 85% with HostGator if you provide one of the best HostGator coupons at the checkout.
And they indeed include a plenty of extras for that money. You can rely on their user friendly site management options that are completely based on cPanel, and if you need a CMS, you can also add WordPress with a single click.
They secure you unlimited storage, bandwidth, email accounts and much more. Their servers are up 99,99% of the time, which is in accordance with the latest standards. Their plans are rather realistic, as you don’t get any unreasonable limitations with the basic pan that might force you to upgrade.
HostGator integrated more than enough options in their dashboard, which can be confusing but it comes with the benefit that you can set up everything at one place. For example, you can set up the domain email address right away.
You will get a simple website builder with around a 100 themes that have the HostGator logo, in case you are in a hurry and just want to build up a small website for starters. The provider has tons of support articles available and you can find them either on their portal or through cPanel.
It’s a very smart system since you only need to type in a few words and it will find you the most useful texts related to the topic. If you get stuck, there are always some professionals available at their live chat that is eager to help.
The prices at HostGator are obviously a bit higher than the average, but considering their set of features it’s really not that much. They are actually a great choice for those who want some extras.
Conclusion
If you want to end up with a website hosting service that truly suits your needs, there are a few important points you should consider. Firstly, imagine the website you want to build and gather enough information about each provider. Look for the features that are mostly aligned with your goals.
Also, don’t forget to check the uptime and reliability of their servers. Ideally, you shouldn’t accept a service with less than 99% uptime because you can easily find a better option anyway. The prices for shared hosts generally vary around $5, but if you see one with plans that are above $10, then don’t even bother trying it.
As a beginner, it’s recommended to get familiar with managing a website and accumulating traffic before you consider using a dedicated server or VPS. If you are doing it right, you will eventually need to invest in a more serious website anyway.
The three hosting providers we reviewed are not expensive and you surely get plenty of support, satisfying uptimes, decent loading speeds and you can maintain a couple of websites at the same time. It’s totally worth it for small businesses, personal websites or even just studying CMS and web design.
