How to Choose a Web Hosting Service

Using a Web hosting service has its advantages and disadvantages. If you’re using a Web hosting service for a personal Web page, you don’t need much support. However, if you’re trying to run a business, you probably need a Web host that provides much more substantial services.

The main goal in using any Web host service is to find one that provides a substantial amount of up-time and availability. Up-time refers to a system being online. Availability is when your Website is accessible online to someone via an Internet search.

Reliability

When you choose a Web host, you want one that provides solid customer service. A high quality host should remain online and be available to address technical issues as they arise. If you have to wait for hours to have an issue addressed, you’re going to lose productivity and possibly revenue.

If you’re running multiple pages and taking orders and interacting with customers, you want a tech team that’s going to be there when you need them. The reliability of your Web host often depends on how service is provided.

• Free Web host services are advertiser-sponsored and somewhat limited in their capacity. The “clutter” will likely become annoying at some point, with more downtimes & slow speed, combined with loose customer support.

• Shared hosting service puts you on the same server as some other sites. The main drawback of this can be speed, depending on how many people are using the same server at any given time.

• Cloud hosting is relatively new, but tends to be more reliable since other computers in the “cloud” can compensate if a single piece of hardware is out of commission.

• Resellers are affiliated with an existing service in what amounts to a partnership. In other words, they’re using a hosting service and reselling that service to others. Resellers, in turn, can function as any type of seller based on how their affiliate gets its service.

• Virtual Private Server (VPS) is more or less like cloud hosting, where the host provider offers you a full dedicated server, for max speed, bandwidth & disk space.

Affordability

A major factor in selecting a hosting service is price. Some services provide discounts or offer temporary deals. However, cost should not be the sole factor in selecting a service. Simply going for the cheapest service can leave you without the support you need.

Going with the cheapest service saves you money initially, but lost revenue and endless hours of frustration when trying to get tech support quickly negate any advantages to saving a few bucks. There is no one “best” Web hosting service. The “best” service is the one that fills all your basic requirements at a reasonable fee.

Speed

A Web hosting service is not of any real value if it has slow load times and other related technical issues. Most rankings of hosting services take speed into account over the bells and whistles a service offers.

Shared hosting services may provide everything you need at a reasonable price, but such services rarely achieve a top ranking because the server quickly becomes overcrowded and slow.

Conversely, there are faster Web hosting services that don’t offer the technical support to justify the advantage of speed.

Ranking

The best web hosting services are those that can offer a combination of these factors: Reliability, affordability and speed. An important additional factor is ease of use. Some hosts provide a control panel or interface to manage the Web server.

This allows you to install scripts and other applications you need to effectively run your Web pages. Some hosting services offer specific software or services.

The final verdict on a Web hosting service is: does it provide the customer service and versatility you need at a price you can afford?