When choosing a hosting service for your website, there are a few considerations that you need to make.

Most of the hosting companies out there will be promising you the sky and promises of 99 percent uptime, huge bandwidths, great support and limitless resources are common and can be found in many of the hosting services sold by the various hosting companies.

It is thus in your interest for you to do some research in these companies before making your final choice.

7 Important Tips to Finding Your Perfect Web Hosting

1. Price

The price of each hosting service can go as Low as $1.99 per month to as high as a few hundreds per month. As most other things, the hosting service provided is not made equal. Hosting companies have to make a profit and somebody have to pay for all those servers, technical maintenance, outsourced and in-house support and many other things that a business would need to survive.

Heck, you can even get free hosting but be prepared to have ads being shown on your site. The hosting company that gives free hosting needs to make money some way or another. You and me know that there is no such thing as free lunch.

So do not just jump on a free offer when it comes to getting a hosting service. This is especially true if you intend to build a website that is going to be more than just a company profile site. If the website that you are going to build is going to play a very important role to your overall business and you are going to buy tons of traffic to get to your site, you will need a hosting service that is going to be able to handle all your requirements, right down to getting the necessary support when the time comes for you to need one.

As such, do examine closely the features that the hosting company provides and ensure that the features you need for your website is available in the package that you choose.

2. Be Clear On Your Website Requirements

There are many types of websites that you can build. You need to be clear right from the start the type of website that you intend to build.

=> Are you planning to build a forum for your online community?

=> Do you intend to build a blog using the most popular blogging platform on the internet right now that is WordPress?

=> Are you building a site for your photography business and need a gallery as well as quality hosting to showcase your work properly.

=> Is your site an old site that have thousands of traffic each day and you need to migrate to a hosting service that offers more space?

=> Do you need a special script to run your site and do you need a certain kind of technology for your site, a PHP script, Perl, Ruby, etc so that your site can run fast and load at lightning speed?

=> Where are the majority of your target audience based?

=> Do you need additional services such as managed hosting, email services and offside backups?

You need to be clear of your website requirements so that you don’t hit a roadblock that would only delay your project.

If you are not sure whether the hosting company have the requirements that you need, send them an email or chat with them on their live chat line if they have that service on their site. Most of the bigger hosting companies would have a chat line ready for prospective customers.

3. Testimonials of Existing Clients

Once you have made some good comparisons of the various hosting providers that meet your Budget and your technical requirements, you should look for the testimonials that have been left by the hosting providers existing clients.

Some of the hosting companies showcase their most prominent and biggest client on their site. See for yourself who these clients are and whether you can recognise any of them. It is one thing to have testimonials and it is another to have testimonials from some of the biggest internet companies and personalities out there.

Also be more discerning than just accepting the recommendation of a celebrity blogger as they might be recommending a service because they are getting paid for it. Of course there are endorsements backed up by their true belief of how great a hosting service is but be aware that there are those that do it for a quick buck.

You can also look for hosting reviews. A quick Google will turn up a few sites that will tell you the reliability of a hosting provider. You will get reviews of how fast they respond to their customers and whether customers like their service or not.

You will also find negative reviews that tell you the negative experiences some of these customers might encounter with a particular hosting provider. Do your due diligence and research well on the hosting provider that you have zoomed in. It would do you good to change your decision now on a hosting provider than later.

4. Support

What is the kind of support that the hosting provider provides?

No hosting company can give you 100 percent uptime and when there is a glitch in the system and your site goes down, you need to know what kind of support you will be getting from the hosting company.

=> Do they have a hotline that you can call?

=> Are they going to pick up the phone and attend to you and help you fix your problem or are they just going to attend to you through email or chatline and nothing else?

You need to know about the help that you can get now before anything happens to your site than go fire fighting and complaining about the poor support you are getting when a problem really hits you. Support in my opinion is the deal breaker when it comes to hosting.

Get a hosting service from a company that provides great support and is backed by testimonials of clients that give rave reviews due to the wonderful support that they have gotten from that company.

5. Backup

Find out about your host’s data recovery plan when you hit a situation of disastrous proportions. Do ensure that you get a hosting service provider that backs up your website.

The best ones provide a daily backup and if anything were to happen to your site and you need to restore your site to how it looks like in an earlier version, you can.

In the past, I have had a situation where I accidentally deleted a part of my website. That part of the site contains a lot of data and to have it back up manually would take countless hours of my time and time is a resource that I just cannot spare too easily. I contacted my hosting service provider and requested my site to be reinstated as it was a few days back and viola my site came back up again as the hosting service provider did daily automatic backups and had all my data in place for such a reinstate to take place.

Also do ensure that your hosting service provider I’d backing up their backups. We don’t want to get into a situation where the backups get into trouble and there isn’t any more backups for us to depend on just in case some misfortune happens.

6. Types of Hardware Used

It is good to know what kind of machines your hosting service provider is using. I they do not explicitly tell you this detail, you can ask them for more details about it. You do not want to later on find out that they are using some old machines from the dark ages tied together using a skipping rope. That could mean potential disaster for you and it ain’t good for business.

Knowing that your hosting service providers are using top of the line servers with the ability to scale up is something that would want to know.

Sometimes paying a few dollars more every month to have a peace of mind that your hosting service provider is using industry grade servers that offers the kind of performance that you need to power your site is all that you need.

7. Control Panel

What would you be getting and using to have access to your site in order to have access to the important areas of your site?

Most hosting service providers give you a cpanel or plesk to let you gain access to your hosting account and allow you to install WordPress, setup your email, setup your ftp, create a new database and more. Find out from the hosting service provider the interface that you would be getting before you sign up with them.

The last thing in the world that you want is to have a clunky old interface that even the most veteran of internet marketers would have a problem trying to identify.

– Ardy