Do not read this article, lest you will change your Hosting Company!

What things should we consider when we are looking for the services of a hosting company. They all say that they are the best. Almost every company claims to host at least ten thousand websites. It becomes confusing for a new webmaster to decide. This article aims to assist you in finalizing the hosting company you should go with. The final decision will off course be yours, but here you will find some points or say parameters in scripting terms, which will help you in making or breaking/changing the final deal!

Uptime and Response Time

The Server Uptime: - If your website is brand new, the server uptime and response time should be one of the most important things. By uptime we mean that in a given period of time what is the probability that the web server is working fine. For example, if a website claims that the server uptime is 99%. It means that in a month your website might be inaccessible maximum for 7.2 hours. Most of the hosting companies guarantee an uptime of 99.8 – 99.99%. As with other practical things, this percentage is generally based on the performance of the servers over a span of considerable time (say 1year). So, do not assume that the hosting company which claims uptime to be 99% is obliquely trying to say that the server will be down for 7.2 hours every month.

Coming to the response time: - We can think the response time to be the time-duration in which the browser receives the first response from the server. The server response time depends on several factors, two of which are the network connectivity (Internet Speed) of the user and the processing time taken by the server. As you can not change the internet speed of the users of your website, you should ensure that the hardware configuration of your web server is excellent, and the number of websites sharing the same machine as yours is as few as possible. Alternatively you can go for the dedicated hosting.

How to verify
How can you verify what the hosting company is saying is true or not? Is there claim of uptime of 99% is true? How fast are their servers?

You can do the following to verify the claims of a hosting company regarding their uptime.

1. Try to access their home page or any other page which you think of the same size as your would-be website at different hours of day say at 8 AM, 11 AM 2 PM etc. See whether there is any problem with accessing the home page. Do this for three to five days, and you will have a better idea of the uptime.
2. Try to find some websites hosted with the same hosting company you are interested in. You can do this by asking questions in forums etc. You can also use your favorite search engine to do this job for you. After doing some research it is more likely that you will come up with some data to help you out with your decision.
3. If you are able to find some websites already hosted by the same company you are interested in, do the exercise explained in the step one with them also. Here you should note that, the page loads and response time depend on the size of the page also. So, you will have to make some judicious observation. If you think that a particular page is taking a longer time to load, see if it can be justified with your internet connection, or by the size of the page content or both.

The steps mentioned above might not give you the exact uptime or response. This may be because, depending on your plan, the services might differ. But it will at least help you to have an idea of their service quality, their uptime and response time if the hosting company is genuine.

Cost

The cost of hosting will be and should be a major factor in determining the hosting solution best fitting you. You should change the page on which you find that the cost of hosting will exceed what you can afford. If you can not afford $100 per month plan, then whatever facilities they might be providing you, it is absolutely of no use to you. This is simply because you can not afford to pay that much price. The web hosting market is extremely competitive today. So, inadvertently (?) you will find a suitable company to host your website at whatever the maximum price you can think to pay. Off course there will be trade off between the cost and other facilities, but seeing the ultimate objective as to publish the website, we will have to go with it.

Accessibility

By accessibility we mean how it is easier for you to access the main folder of your website. Can you access it using ftp clients? Do they provide other standard web based control panels like C-panel or Plexus? If they provide there own web based control panel, how user friendly is it? You should try to focus on these things. If you will be accessing and doing your coding from a cyber café etc. then you should make sure that the hosting company you choose gives you the facility to do online coding also. This facility now-a-days is provided by almost every hosting company with their every plan. However if the price increases on including this facility in your hosting plan, include this option only if you require it. After all there is no use in paying extra for a feature you will never use.

How to verify?
Many websites offering some web control panel provide a demo link. Use this link to get an idea of how easy it would be to access different folders of your website.
Are the features you are looking for present there? Experiment as much as you can do with the demo control panel. Try to use all the features provided by the control panel. Some features might be protected for registered user only. But using other features will give you an insight of these protected features also.

Bandwidth

The maximum bandwidth allowed for your website is also a major point which should be considered while deciding the hosting plan. The bandwidth is the total traffic up and down your website. That is the bandwidth is the sum of kilobytes downloaded from your website and the kilobytes uploaded to your website. This may or may not include the bandwidth used by you while uploading and modifying your website content. The bandwidth also includes all modes of data transfer (mostly the HTTP and FTP). The bandwidth is calculated mostly on the monthly basis in MB/month (Megabytes per month).

What bandwidth should be considered ideal for your website? The ideal bandwidth depends on the nature of the website. If your website is made up of simple text based websites with content not exceeding 20Kb, then you may opt for lower bandwidth. In contrast, if your website has rich audio and visual content, then the bandwidth requirement will shoot up drastically. If yours is an old website hosted some where else, then you will certainly be having bandwidth related data. Use this while deciding your next hosting company. If yours is a new website, you should initially opt for the bandwidth at least hundred times of your whole web content. That is if your web content is 10Mb then look for a bandwidth of 1GB/month.

Bandwidth selection also depends on one other factor, what will happen if the bandwidth exceeds the limit of your hosting plan? Many hosting companies simply upgrade your current plan to the next level of plan. See if this condition is right for you. In some other cases, the companies take some fee for the additional bandwidth only. See if the charges for this additional bandwidth are as per your pocket. If the website does not seem to provide such details just send a query to their support staff, but you should make it clear beforehand so as to avoid any surprises in your hosting bill!

Disk Space

Disk space is the amount of hard disk provided to you by your hosting company to put your website content. This factor should not have a critical role in your decision if your website is new and does not have much image and video content. By new website I mean a website with 100-200 pages. Off course your requirements will grow with each passing day. But you should wait for that day to come. It is not advisable to stress for much space initially, when you expect that much disk space requirement after a long time (say 1year) only.

However things are quite different if you have lots of high quality images and loads of video or music files. These things will require you to opt for more disk space and bandwidth both. If your web contents are static and you are the only one who can add images or videos to your web content then it will be a little easier to decide the disk space requirement. However if you allow uploads by users also, then you should choose a plan which permits easy up-gradation to other plans. This becomes more important if you have little idea of your user base and their upload nature. If you plan a file sharing sort of website then it would be best to go for dedicated hosting plans from the beginning itself, even if you will not be using that much bandwidth or disk space initially. This is because the users will not wait indefinitely for their files to be uploaded and shared hosting plans have relatively poorer performance.

Technical Support

Hosting companies almost always provide you technical and non-technical support. The non-technical support will generally include the billing related issues, Queries regarding your hosting plans, how-to-upgrade sort of queries or any other non-technical queries. What you should look for here is the promptness of replies, How quickly they resolve your issue, How quickly they reply to queries, How pointed there reply is etc.

There is very small chance that you will require any technical issues if you opt for a shared hosting plan. This is because all the technical issues are handled by the hosting company itself. For this reason you can expect all the promised software to be already installed on the machine. The server configuration, creation of your account related control panels, access to their databases etc would already be complete. You will require very little assistance in case you opt for shared hosting. However if internet world is new to you, you might feel a little unconfident of yourself. With time this thing will wane out.

Things will be different when plan to use a virtual hosting. In virtual hosting the things are different. You will be provided with basic setup only. You will be responsible for all the software installation and probably the server configuration also. If you feel that you will not be able to do all these, check whether the hosting company provides you technical support. In some cases they might charge you extra for this assistance. But there is no problem in shelling out a little extra if the service is good.

To verify the quality of support, you should just send in several genuine looking queries to the support staff at their e-mail address. These queries could begin like ‘I am a new, to- be customer. I am looking for a suitable hosting company to host my website. One of my friends recommended me your website and I was wondering if you could clarify the “Gold plan”. I am interested particularly in the ...” Now wait for the reply to come. See if the reply came within the timeframe mentioned on the website, if mentioned. Or see if you are comfortable with the time taken. Many hosting companies provide 24*7 live supports. By live support they mean that someone will be always there to respond to your queries. You should check whether the live support is available at odd hours, for example at 2A.M in the morning. Here you should remember that the 2 A.M should be local to the country where the support center is situated.

Last thing
see if the hosting company gives you a free trial. If the company gives you the free trial account then you should not hesitate to use it. Put some pages there, experiment with the entire feature and see if you are comfortable with them before you decide to go with them.