Are you creating a website and now need to choose a good hosting? If you are in doubt about which to hire, rest assured: you are not alone. Many people are faced with this question and are left without knowing where to start. In this article, we’ll explain how to choose a good hosting in just 4 steps.
First comes the hosting company, which needs to offer quality service and always available for support. These are the minimum requirements because without them you run the risk of having your site unavailable when you need it most.
Apart from choosing the company, you also need to choose a hosting plan. This is because each company offers different plans for different types of website. Each plan has specific settings, which can change a lot from company to company.
Here’s a practical way to help you by explaining how to choose good hosting in just 4 steps.
1. Size of your website
The site you own or are building is small or large? If you do not know how much space it occupies, think about the number of pages. Is it a site that has up to 10 pages or much larger than that? How many pictures and videos?
This question is important because the size of your site will determine the disk space required in your hosting. Now we will show the ideal hosting for both cases.
Small to medium – Institutional site, from a local business or blog
If you have an institutional site or a blog, the hosting of sites (shared hosting) will respond calmly. This type of hosting is the most popular and caters to the vast majority of websites on the internet such as the blog, for example. In addition, it is the cheapest and is offered by all hosting companies. Plans range from Rs. 109 to Rs. 390 a month. There are also specific hosting plans for WordPress.
A shared hosting plan works like this: multiple clients share the same server, that is, they host their sites on a single server. This does not mean that the service will be bad since we will have dozens of sites sharing the same server. Hosting companies have the means to ensure that a client who is abusing the features of one machine does not interfere with another client hosted on the same server.
Medium to Large, robust websites or a professional blog
If you have a site with many pages and especially many files, such as photos, videos, and audio, such as an image download site, it is recommended that you hire a more robust plan such as a VPS server, cloud or dedicated server. In this case, the amount and size of the files make more difference than the number of pages in the site.
If the site has not yet been published, you can start with an ordinary website hosting and expect your site to grow to migrate to a more robust plan. After all, this may take some time and you will save a lot in the meantime since the values of the hosting vary a lot.
2. Number of accesses to the site
Does your site get a lot of visitors? Evaluating the traffic is important because of the bandwidth offered by the hosting plans. In addition, every time a page load, it uses some of the hosting server ‘s features.
Small to moderate access
If you have a moderately- level blog or site, you can host your site on shared site hosting. As we speak, most of the blogs, in the beginning, are hosted on a shared server, and once they start having a lot of hits (which is great!), the plans are upgraded.
Many access or traffic peaks
A site with lots of hits can quickly consume the resources available up to the limit set by the hosting plan, which can cause the site to be down. This scenario is quite common on sites that have a large audience and advertise their content on social networks. When you publish a new link in the social network, the site will receive a flood of new visitors and may become unavailable if you are staying in a plan that does not hold on the hit. In cases like this, the recommendation is to hire a VPS, Dedicated or Cloud hosting.
3. Existence of a virtual store
If you have an eCommerce website, your hosting needs to offer SSL security protocol and a Dedicated IP, which ensure the security of customer data through encryption of information sent and received. Not offering this kind of security is putting your customers’ information at risk, which could be exposed to malicious people.
If the sale is made through a third-party payment tool, such PayPal, there is no such concern, as the sale will be made in the secure environment of those third-party companies.
The plan varies according to the size of the store. If there are only a few pages and products, an ordinary website hosting, but with dedicated SSL and IP will meet your needs. Already medium and large online stores require more robust plans such as VPS server, dedicated server, and cloud. Some companies offer hosting plans for virtual stores, which may or may not include the eCommerce platform itself.
4. Evaluating a good hosting
By answering the above questions, you are now able to choose the right hosting plan for your website. If you prefer to go deeper into the subject, see other important points when choosing a good hosting:
About hosting company
- Reputation in the market – What are the opinions of the customers and what is the size of the company?
- Support – What channels and hours of service do they offer?
- Management – Is the control panel easy to understand?
- Guarantees – Does the company offer refund if the customer is not satisfied?
- Uptime – Does the company offer a guarantee of server availability above 99.5%?
About the hosting plan
- Disk space – What disk space is offered in the plan?
- Data transfer – What is the bandwidth limit of the plan?
- Platform – Is Linux or Windows hosting offered?
- Email – How many email accounts and what storage space on each account is offered?
- Extras – Is there a website builder? And features such as private SSL and dedicated IP?
And the price, should I take it into account?
The price issue should not be decisive in your choice of hosting, but it may help you. There are hosting companies with very competitive prices, which offer a service of great quality. This is because the price is related to several factors, such as the location of the server. Companies with servers outside India usually offer cheaper plans than those that host in India.
When analyzing the price of a hosting plan, consider what is being offered and what its guarantees are. If it is a good hosting and the price is within the expectation, then there is a good option.
I hope the tips will help you to choose a good hosting plan.
