How to Pick Up the Right Web Host: Checklist!

A checklist for those who are looking for a hosting service. How to protect yourself from a bad web host? How to know if a web host is good? Without an idea how will you choose between cloud hosting, dedicated, shared and VPS hosting? Do the bandwidth and disk storage features still matter these days? What type of service one should opt for?

Now, get all the answers for the above questions in this article and save your money.

Step 1: Know Your Own Web Hosting Needs

You can never get the right web host without know you actually need for your website. Keep a pause on the list top 10 web hosting service for the moment and first know you really need.

• What sort of site would you say you are building?
• Do you require Windows applications?
• What sort of site are planning to build?
• Do you require an extraordinary variant of programming (ie. PHP)?
• Does your site need exceptional programming?
• Till what extent can the web traffic go?

So, these are very obvious questions that you should answer first. Have a plan with your website and try to figure out what will happen next for the following 12 months after you have opted for a web host. Especially for the people who are just starting out their small businesses, they should start with a small ie. shared hosting accounts as these are cheap, sufficient for new websites and easy to maintain. Also, anyone with a shared hosting account can upgrade to VPS or dedicated accounts at any point of time.

Step 2: Server Uptime Record

Nothing is more essential than having a 24×7 working web host. You require a web host which is working on an effective server with stable network connections. 99.5% or more is the suggested uptime score; anything beneath 99% is inadmissible. There are various other approaches to get a web host uptime information.

On the other hand, you can just track your web host with server monitoring tools. There are many tools that are free on trial.

Step 3: Multiple Addon Domains

Now, getting a domain is easy and very cheap. It is that cheap that it becomes hard to owning only one. There are webmasters who own dozens of domain names. Also, to host these domains there is a need of extra hosting space. And, for this reason it is important to have a hosting account which allows you to add multiple domains in one account.

Most hosting providers allow you to add 25 domain in one account but sometimes you can’t be sure about this. So, always check the domain capacity before you pay for the hosting account. Here are a few examples to choose from: GoDaddy, Hostgator, bluehost, iPage, IX Web Hosting, and FatCow.

Step 4: Server Upgrade Options

These days shared web hosts are quite powerful. A shared hosting account is now quite sufficient to bolster a proper-optimized WordPress blog with 30,000 - 40,000 visitors monthly. If you manage to limit your concurrent database connections below 20, it is sure you will do good and for this reason I mentioned that it’s always best to start with a shared hosting if you are new.

On the other hand, if you are really expecting to grow your websites really big in next few years, then you should consider getting a web host that can grow according to your needs. The meaning of grow here is upgrading your web host from a shared hosting to VPS or Dedicated hosting servers. For more memory space, processing power, disk storage and better security features.

Step 5: E-Commerce Features

Do you own an e-commerce website? Are you planning to process business transactions on your website? Do you use a shopping cart software? If the answers to all these questions is yes, the first thing you need is a web host with all features that can support e-commerce, such as: dedicated IP, SSL certificate and one-click shopping cart software installation are some of the essential features that you need.

If you’ve got something to add to this post, please feel free to do so in the comment section! We are always open to new ideas.