7 Key Factors to Consider While Selecting a Web Host

selecting a web host

In my previous article the guide to choosing the type of hosting provider, we discussed the different types of web hosting providers. Now once you have zeroed in on the type of host you need to consider the essential factors on which to base your decision of selecting a web hosting service.

It is important to choose a web host that perfectly caters to all the requirements of your website. Your requirement might be for a corporate website, E-commerce website, Content heavy blog, high traffic or selecting a web host or any other type of web application. There are so many hosting providers that you can definitely find the right match for your requirement.

Below are the 7 key factors to consider while selecting your web hosting service

Technical Support

This is one of the most important factors to consider while selecting a web host. The web host should provide 24×7 technical support. They need to have live chat, ticket and call support. Also, you need to check how soon you are able to get access to the required support. Like the ticket resolution time should be in a couple of hours instead of days.

You need to get access to the technical support specialist via chat in a couple of minutes and you need not wait on chat for 30 minutes just to get access to the support person. Same goes for the call while calling some providers you will need to wait in a queue and wait for long before you get access to the support specialist.

And some providers are quick in responding back and some will even call you back in a couple of minutes. Providers have gone till the extent of branding their support like Rackspace calls it Fanatical Support and Liquidweb calls it Heroic support. You will not only require server support but also you will require application-specific support. Hence if you go for SharePoint hosting you will need to make sure you have access to SharePoint support specialists.

Security

Security is another crucial factor, to make sure that your server and application environment is safe from any vulnerabilities. The provider should take care that all server Operating Systems are loaded, hardened and managed to ensure maximum selecting a web host security. Many hacking and DDoS attacks can be prevented by consistent patching and by the disabling of non-essential OS services.

Another aspect is selecting a web host application software like databases, Microsoft IIS, Apache, mail services, FTP servers, and open-source software packages. All the software including the open-source packages (Joomla, WordPress, Magento, and many others) need to be of the latest version and unwanted services need to be disabled to allow no entry points for malicious attacks.

Backup

Your provider must provide you regular backups. They should be able to provide you a backup of your site data for a particular day, they should clearly mention they can restore the day of the previous month or 3 months or beyond that. This is useful when you need to restore your website from the last backup in case your server is down and your data cannot be recovered. Or due to SQL injection, your files are infected and you require a clean backup.

Many hosting providers take incremental backups (files that were transferred or replaced on the day) of your server on a daily basis and are also able to retrieve any backup of a particular date. They take incremental backup on a daily basis and take the entire server backup on a particular day of the week (Generally on weekly holidays as server load is low). Some providers keep backups of the last 15 days and some keep backups of the last 3 months.

It is always advisable to take regular backups of your selecting a web host files and your database files. If your backup data is in GBs then your hosting provider can provide you a disc backup and courier it to your address (they might charge you for the hard drive and the shipping charges).

Hence, it’s best to clarify the backup policy of the hosting provider in advance.

Uptime Guarantee

Web host providers make claims of uptime guarantee of 99.5% or 99.9%. It is better to sign an SLA with your provider if critical applications are hosted with the provider, in case the provider does not have any agreements then their terms and conditions, Warranty, Disclaimer will mention details about their uptime guarantees.

Many claims are just to attract the customer, like 99% uptime guaranteed. Refer the below table which gives details about how much of downtime to expect if the provider guarantees you 99% or 99.9%. As the table shows 99% guarantee means that you can expect a downtime of approx. 3 days per year.

selecting a web host
Availability of site

One more point is availability mentioned by the hosting provider, is it network uptime guarantee or web application uptime guarantee. There might be a case that your website is up and running, but it is showing errors because the database application is down. It’s best to clarify with the provider that by availability they mean network availability, hardware availability, software availability, or all.

Bandwidth

This is the amount of bandwidth data transfer, you can upload or download data for a particular period. I suggest you avoid providers which claim to provide you unlimited bandwidth and storage. Otherwise, you could face issues like getting a warning that you have used your quota of bandwidth for the month and the provider might charge you for higher usage.

The other consequence could be that the other users on your shared server will be using high resources which could result in reduced performance of your website. In the limited bandwidth and storage scenario, every user is aware of the quota they are allotted hence there are no unwanted surprises.

Server Location

Many web hosting providers are based in the US and they are also very cost-effective. If you are based in Hong Kong and you choose a provider from the US then your website will take much longer to load for your Hong Kong visitors.

If your business is located in Hong Kong then choose to select a web host that has a web server in Hong Kong. Also, clarify with the web host regarding the location of your web server. For SEO purposes, load times of websites are considered, if you host at a local server then your load times will be better.

Pricing Plan

Hence, you need to choose between a monthly plan or a yearly plan. The yearly plan can provide you some savings, but it will make it more difficult for you to move to another provider if you are not happy with the services. If you have not experienced the services of the web host, it’s advisable to go for a monthly plan. Some selecting a web host gives you a trial period of 15 days to a month, hence you can also choose this to get a feel of the services of the provider.

Carefully choose the plan that exactly caters to all your requirements. As mentioned in my earlier post consider reviews of your professional network or reviews posted by users on forums like selecting a web host talk.

Thanks for reading this all the way till the end. Share your thoughts and your valued feedback. If you have found this article useful kindly share it.

8 Comments


Jason Girard

Jason Girard    Posted on: August 29, 2015 8:40 pm  Reply

Great tips, Manish. I think that the most important factor that influence the quality of web hosting is reliability. From my own experience I've found www.rosehosting.com to be one of the most reliable and affordable hosts out there.

    Manish Raaval

    Manish Raaval    Posted on: August 29, 2015 9:19 pm  Reply

    Jason, Thank you for the kind words. Yes you are absolutely right, reliability is the most important factor. Nice to hear about your experience with the mentioned hosting provider. Looking forward to hearing much more from you.

Theodore Nwangene

Theodore Nwangene    Posted on: September 3, 2015 3:48 am  Reply

Great post Manish, Indeed, i think that choosing a web host is one of those things that no body should rush into for any reason. There are so many things to consider while making this decision and if you select the wrong one, it will make your life such a miserable one. Its always good to put all the factors you mentioned here in mind before deciding on which one to go with. Especially making sure they have a high level of security because a unsecured server can do you lots of harm just as i experienced when i first started. Also, ensuring that they have a very nice customer support is a bonus as well because this will enable you to always get your problems and complains attended to as fast as possible.

    Manish Raaval

    Manish Raaval    Posted on: September 3, 2015 7:43 am  Reply

    Theodore, Glad you enjoyed the post. You are right the decision of choosing a web host is very important and it should be done after proper research. Looking forward to hearing much more from you.

Priya Singh

Priya Singh    Posted on: September 9, 2015 5:36 am  Reply

Hi Manish, Nice to see this blog post . actually i am newbie in this blogging field and started working with a blogger so these days i am learning about web hosting and many more about it internally. So this is one of the best guide for me . Thanks for Sharing :)

    Manish Raaval

    Manish Raaval    Posted on: September 12, 2015 8:53 am  Reply

    Hi Priya, Thank you for the Comment. Glad you found this post useful. Looking forward to hearing much more from you.

Saurabh Tripathi

Saurabh Tripathi    Posted on: October 19, 2015 1:31 pm  Reply

Great Post, Actually hosting is the second biggest choice to make when someone is creating a blog and a good hosting assures a great and healthy website. The post is definitely great on advising a blogger to choose a correct host. The thing I worry most about hosting is that despite of the internet having some great lesser know hosts - a lot of people just go with too big companies. Which are not always good, we can look at BlueHost as an example which throttles the CPU power in a lot of cases.

    Manish Raaval

    Manish Raaval    Posted on: October 19, 2015 7:00 pm  Reply

    Thank you for the kind words Saurabh. I agree with you the reason is that these big hosting companies ( ie Bluehost, Hostgator etc) have deep pockets so they are able to spend heavily on marketing. This allows them to get inexperienced people to signup and as usual they never provide good services. Hope to hear more from you. Let me know if you need any help.

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