These days, every web host under the sun claims to be the most unsurpassed.
But how do you REALLY know ‘which is the best web host?
To begin with, you need to break it down to what you need, which is either three families of hosting: Shared Hosting, VPS Hosting, or Dedicated Hosting.
However, you are most likely after shared hosting, which is entry and medium level hosting for small to medium sites. Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting and dedicated web hosting are both more pricey but can handle the resource demands on more big sites.
The Best Web Host’s Control Panel:
This is the interface that will let you tweak your site settings and even view your visitor statistics, such as which web site they came from, which country they are in and some other details. Without this, everything becomes 10 times more difficult. Creating an email account to use will suddenly take an hour of research instead of 20 easy seconds and will suddenly need almost programmer level skills without this simple interface. Your Control Panel makes doing any of this, easy for absolutely anyone. Only go with web hosting companies offering cPanel” (or possibly even, DirectAdmin”). If they don’t offer these, don’t go forward with them.
The Best Web Host’s Support:
Everyone wants best-bang web hosting support that will answer their questions fast. But if you are paying $3 a month, you can’t expect support that’s going to be that good. But some support should be available. Check if they have a number to call (most won’t which isn’t that much of a bad thing), but if they have a Live Support” chat button, that’s a huge plus, and a very helpful thing to have available to you in case you need to contact them fast.
The Best Web Host’s Uptime and Reliability
If they are clearly not offering a 99.9% Uptime guarantee, don’t go forward with them. Downtime is agitating and costly for anyone advertising their sites. Web travelers that come to your site when it’s down, will be very turned off to to returning. The simple way to know of their reliability is to read reviews and other people’s views. However a quick way to test speed (but not quite dependable) is to see how fast the host’s own web page loads up for you, which can give you an sign of what kind of speed your site will be load with.
The Best Web Host’s Free Scripts
If the web host you want to choose is using cPanel, they will very often provide you with over 50+ free easily installable scripts through an addon known as Fantastico”. This is very useful, as it includes entire e-commerce shopping carts, CMS systems, forum software and heaps of extras, all installable with one mouse click. Not absolutely required, but certainly comes in handy.
The Best Web Host’s Per Month Pricing
Now if you are like a good number of people. You want good value, and don’t want to use up your budget. Web Hosting has become a commodity” item with loads of competition. You can even find web hosts offering hosting for a measly $3 a month. However, you can expect downtime and slowness and emotional distress with these cheaper-than-chips web hosts. End result, not worth saving a couple of bucks with these cheaper than lollies web hosts. Go for something around the $8-12 mark. Yes that’s over 5 times the fee of our $2 competition. But this means the web host can actually afford to give you top support and put your account on a server that will always be up, and also run with speed.
Believe it or not, you in fact pay far more with a super-cheap web host because of downtime, unusual slowness, lost visitors and lost revenue, poor support, and your own frustration when you check and see your website is down and your host is out of reach to help or are very slow to respond. Web hosting is really something that will get you in the behind if you go with the cheapest is best mentality and that is in fact the rock-hard.
