How to choose the right hosting for your business

$INeed$

Well-Known Member
One of the most important decisions for your website is to find a great hosting service. It is essential to choose a good service. There is a risk for your entire web blueprint to fail if your hosting provider is not good enough. You ask yourself how to find the best hosting provider when there are hundreds of them? It is hard to know if a company stands behind its clients and whether its reputation is good. Our team has a lot of experience and we will try to collect all you need to get a good place to store your website. We’ve spent a lot of days in testing different hosting companies. We will help you find the right way.

1. Know what you need before you make the final decision

You want to just play around with the hosting with some of your fellow friends? Or you want to create a local business so you can make some money? There are a lot of free hosting providers which are okay if you are doing something to entertain yourself. But if you want to achieve something greater – to start a business which you will make your money from, you will need something serious and durable. ​

2. Does the hosting company provide you with Site Builder technology in case you don’t have the needed programming knowledge?

Most of the companies in these days are offering services of that kind. Take in mind, a big number of the Site Builders which are offered by the providers are copyrighted. They often work only on the company’s servers. They are good if you want to make a small business website. Consider that in the future your business can grow bigger. You will need the best possible online presence. When this time comes, you will need more advanced hosting services which will answer your needs. If this happens, there is a chance the transfer to be impossible or very hard to do. You’ll have to build it again. From the beginning .

3. If you don’t have past experience and you will just make a small web site.

Which is the control panel system that you will use? cPanel, ispCP or ISP Config technology which will let you create your own blog or forum with just a few clicks.(The systems we talk about are the software that will give you the connection between the server and you. They are the tools needed to get access to your files and your website without the need to rely on the FTP – File Transfer Protocol.)

4. Get your e-mail through your site’s domain.

Almost every company offers unlimited number of mail accounts, e-mail pseudonyms and so on. This service is important because you will use it in most of the time when communicating with your visitors. Using an address like your_name@name_of_your_website.com looks more professional and trustworthy to your followers and potential customers.

5. Research about the methods used to upload your data.

The use of online file managers takes a lot more time when you want to transfer information with really big size. The FTP gives you the needed flexibility when controlling your site. Especially when you are not a tech-savvy, look for companies that can offer you a good and simple to use file manager.

6. Track the progress of your site through the logs.

If you are a serious entrepreneur, give the needed attention to all the log files in your control panel. All of the professional and durable hosting services give you the opportunity to use the log files to analyze all the things happening to it.

7. Get enough disk space. Your site will evolve and you will need it.

The disk space is one of the most important aspects when we talk about developing a business. If you mean to make it grow consider in your mind that you may need a lot more storage space.

8. Test the connection speed between your computer and the hosting network: Start->Run->write „cmd” , after that write ping hostdomainname.com (hostdomainname is the name of the hosting company you are testing)


Wait for all the hops to finish and write down the average time to complete them all. It is good for the numbers to be as low as possible. Numbers that are near 80 are nice. If the numbers you see are bigger than 100, there is a big chance for the hosting to not satisfy you. Keep in mind that the hosting could be positioned in another country. The amount of time needed gets more when the server is far away.

9. Look for companies that offer good customer support and complete help pages on their website, Frequently Asked Questions, 24/7 phone support lines. The time need for a response if you’ve send an e-mail ticked should be no more than 48 hours.

Go away from companies that are famous with their support problems and bad reputation. Check the average time for an answer of a question on the phone. Take a moment to find the real uptime %, which they “guarantee”.

10. Activate the interactive possibilities of your site by having an access to you cgi-bin directory.

This is the directory where all your scripts start from. CGI scripts are something that is like the spine of all functions in your site. Every time when you fill some kind of form, buy a product or use a forum you start a lot of different scripts. This is a very important system if you want to do something interactive with your page.

11. Know all the details when you buy a hosting.

Most of the small and average sized web sites (a few thousand visitors a day) are maintained on a set of cheap hosting solutions. Compare the specifications of the hosting packages you may want to use. How much RAM you will use with your hosting plan? (Minimum of 512MB) What the speed of the processor unit is. Huge and active web sites tend to use more than 10GB of storage space and tens of thousands visitors a day. To operate like it should, they need to be placed on a dedicated hosting server.

12. Learn the difference between Windows and Linux servers.

Linux servers are more expensive to buy. It is more difficult to work with them and to support them. On the other side they are more stable and secure than the Windows servers. When we talk about Linux servers, you will have a lot more free apps with open source code.

13. A few more tips:

Using the name of the hosting company, do research in Google. You will find some reviews and you will know whether the reputation is good. If the company is offering its services for more than a year, you will for sure found some information based on other’s opinions and articles. A good place to see how the company takes care of the customer is the Facebook Page. You will find negative and positive reviews, promotions, news and so on.

Most of the short and popular domain names are taken by someone. Before paying for your hosting, you can use any instrument to check if a domain name is available for your website.
Choose the right type of hosting you need. – Shared Hosting; VPS or Dedicated Server;

Shared hosting is the cheapest solution but it is not always the best, especially when we talk about huge projects. Dedicated servers are the most expensive ones but they can provide you with the biggest quantity of power and security.

There is a variety of hosting companies’ sites which offer comparisons of all the web hosting services they offer. This could be helpful and will save some of your time.
Don’t forget that a durable hosting server is one of the basics to have a good online presence. A fundamental that you will develop in the future.
 
От: How to choose the right hosting for your business

Really useful information, thank you for sharing it with us. I'm currently monitoring two websites (not mine) on two different top hosting providers in US and from what I see their shared servers are not well optimized and the overselling seems to be something normal. For the past two weeks the websites were not accessible for more than 6 hours which is quite unpleasant.

My advise here will be to check also the refund policy of the hosting provider you choose (the refund period varies from 30 to 60 days). With that period you will already know if the hosting service is good or bad and you can get your money back and transfer the website to different provider if needed. Note that if you purchase a hosting account with free domain name the price of the domain is non-refundable. Also, make sure the provider can offer 24/7/365 tech support for your needs.
 

Горе