What are the important factors to consider before choosing a web host provider? Consider these 11 factors when determining what company to choose for your web hosting and registering your domain name.
Choosing the best WordPress hosting provider for your website is of paramount importance. Because good and reliable hosting can improve your SEO and increase sales.
There are basically five different types of WordPress hosting options available as
11 Tips for Choosing the Best WordPress Hosting Provider
1 Review
This is the best and an easy way to find out about the reputation of a web hosting provider. Go on and spend some time reading reviews and testimonials from their current and previous customers.
You can easily search, for example, “Customer review for XYZ hosting provider“. It’s important because the present customer will give you an honest review.
2 Reliability
By reading the reviews of customers you can get a fairly good idea about a hosting provider.
Only go for a host that guarantees a minimum of 99.5% uptime. This is the most important factor as downtime will have a negative impact on your business, sales, and income.
3 Fast Connection
Look for TTFB (time to the first byte) metric defines the exact duration between an end-user browser sending an HTTP/HTTPS GET request to receive the first byte from the requested data packet.
The TTFB should be no longer than 0.5 seconds. In fact, the latest web hosting server configurations and back-end infrastructure design should allow TTFB around 0.1 seconds.
However keep in mind that external influences, such as your internet connection speed play a direct role in TTFB metrics.
Why this metric is important! because even if you optimize your site for speed, if your server is slow your page load time will increase and drive visitors away, and reflect badly on your business.
A good host provides a fast connection so that your website pages will load quickly and result in a positive user experience for your customers. Check out if the host’s own website and images are loading quickly.
Control Panel also referred to as cPanel is a server-side dashboard for the customer. Look for a hosting provider that offers you a user-friendly web-based control panel that will allow you to easily manage many aspects of your website from any location yourself.
A user-friendly cPanel will allow you to easily install WordPress on your site, upload files, images, and update your PHP from time to time.
All hosting providers are competing with each other to provide the best services at an affordable price.
To compare the pricing of several hosting packages to find out where you can save the most money. This is another important factor and it is worthwhile finding out if there are any hidden extra costs for things like bandwidth, renewals, and upgrades.
6 Hosting Server Features
Know your web hosting requirements and then find out what sort of features your web host has to offer.
Look for features like how many domains can be hosted on one account and how much storage and bandwidth is available.
Although most web hosting providers will provide you the most basic needs. Still look for features that enable you to create, publish and manage your site without any bottlenecks.
The web hosting provider must provide all the tools you need to build your site. Support for one-click installation (like WordPress) and other apps that you may need.
Another important feature is E-mail functionality with unlimited accounts, which should come with your domain name.
Opt for a web hosting provider, that provides additional features like, server access option, unlimited FTP accounts, secure shell (SSH) access. These features will come in handy in the long run.
If your site sells goods or services online, you must have a host who will let you set up a secure server (SSL) mostly free, if you are planning to collect credit card payments from your customers.
7 Customer service and support
Although most hosting provider’s traditional methods of customer support are via telephone and email.
Look for a hosting company that runs a live chat service that will give you 24/7 contact with support technicians and engineers to ensure that everything is running optimally and to resolve issues within minutes, instead of hours.
You should choose a web hosting provider who has expertise in Azure managed services and other complex tasks such as g suite email migration to office 365 which needs high monitoring as there are chances of failures due to lack of supervision.
8 Server Location
Choosing the server location can have a substantial impact on your site’s performance, depending on where your audience is located.
You may already know that closer a server is to an end-user, the quicker your pages will load. Therefore, you need to consider the locations your provider offers.
It’s best to have your hosting server located in a country or nearby where your site gets maximum traffic. Although this is not a must, because CDN (content delivery network) services play an important role in delivering your site faster in any part of the world.
However, if the location of your host’s data centers is important to you, you can email the company or do a quick online search to find out their physical location.
9. Bandwidth & Traffic
Bandwidth and traffic mean data transfer, which means the number of bytes downloaded from your site to your visitors.
Check out the hosting provider’s bandwidth regulation. Most hosting provider claims to give unlimited bandwidth.
But there could be hidden extra charges if you exceed a certain limit, so watch out for this in detail in their plans if you think your website will bring in a high level of traffic.
10 Flexibility for future proof
A good web hosting company should give you the options to upgrade or downsize your hosting package should the need arise.
It is a good idea to start with a shared hosting account and then move on to a dedicated server later on if required. However, these days shared server hosting packages provide a reasonable allowance for bandwidth.
If you plan to have a single site, the basic standard package should be sufficient. On the other hand, if you plan to add more domains later to expand in the future, always opt for the package that offers you this option right from the beginning. Rather than to upgrade later.
11. Data Backup
Look for web hosts who do regular backups of data so they should be able to restore your website in full, in case of database and hard disk failures or hackers taking over your site.
Though this situation may not be frequent you should be prepared should the worst happens.
Conclusion
These are some very basic factors to consider before choosing a web host. Hope it helps you to choose the best hosting provider. A good hosting provider is very important to grow your business or Blog.
Keeping these eleven factors in mind, hope we have simplified the host choosing process for you.
Do read the user’s review only, when choosing a hosting provider. There you will get the best and frank opinions and not from the paid reviews.
List of some popular hosting providers, you can choose from
Hello! I am Ben Jamir, Founder, and Author of this blog Tipsnfreeware. I blog about computer tips & tricks, share tested free Software’s, Networking, WordPress tips, SEO tips. If you like my post /Tips then please like and share it with your friends.
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