Before your website goes online, one of the crucial task is to search for a good web hosting provider. To find the most suitable hosting will simply make you happy with the online business and won't face this or that kind of problems on hosting provider.
In order to avoid the nightmare with a poor hosting service, We summarized the following tips when you're searching for your best hosting provider.
Understand what you really need
- Disk space and bandwidth – If you need a simple website with 100MB disk space and bandwidth, then you should find such provider, don't be fooled by those hosts who can offer 10 times more with a cheaper price, they're mostly over sales their space.
- Your budget – If you can pay $7/mon for a hosting account then you should search for a provider under that price.
- Support and server reliability – Support and server uptime is the most crucial things with a hosting, a good hosting provider always comes with 24 x 7 live support and the server uptime is at least 99%.
Research your interested hosting company
- Free addons – Many hosting providers are offering many free bonus such as free domain registration, but you need to make sure you have full control with the domain and if there's any other rules to follow up in case you need to transfer out. Many hosts don't allow domain to transfer out
- Hidden fee – You should read their TOS very carefully, many hosts put their hidden fees in tos and give you a surprise when you request for something such as website backup, host another website etc.
- Customer complaints – A popular web host always generates lots of feedbacks from existing clients. Research the comments from the users via key words like "xx sucks" "xx problems" etc and learn what you need pay attention to.
Understand your website future development
If you're running a forum or community website, you mostly will transfer to a vps or dedicated server in future. When you search for a hosting provider you should check if they have this service. It's always the best to stay with the current service provider because they will help with the transfer on their end, this will save you a lot of time when the website is big.
Never focus on price
Web hosting service is indeed more and more cheap, however you should never take price for your solely consideration. Many hosting providers give out super low cost service to get your business and charge you more for extra services. If you need a decent VPS server, never lookt at a service with shared hosting price.
Avoid long term contracts
Unless you already fully undstand the hosting provider, you should always avoid to pay 2 or 3 years upfront. 1 year is normal contract with a decent hosting company and they always have pro-rated refund policy. If it's your first time in dealing with hosting service, you can try with monthly or quarterly to keep everything in safe place.
Check and ask around
If you're interested in a service provider, you should always ask for suggestions from your friends or community members who have experience with this host before, their experience will give you much help in future business with that host.
Save money using web hosting coupon
Many hosting companies offer some kind promo codes for your money saving. If you have decided to purchase the service with your potential provider, make sure to search out the up to date coupon codes. You can save 10% – 30% from our experience. Of course you'll find many hosts that don't give out coupons, but that doesn't mean they're not good hosts. It's just extra tip for money saving.
Follow our hosting news update
We always keep our web hosting review site up to date. In case you're unsure where to start, just browse our website or chat with us directly for further assistance. We have worked in hosting industry since 2006 and we tested many leading hosts for various websites. You can learn our experience from about us page.
Good luck in your hosting search task!