Quality Web Hosting - What to Look for in a Web Host

 Quality Web Hosting - What to Look for in a Web Host

Guest post by Noven Purnell-Webb, owner of Magedata IT.  Magedata specialise in Regional IT, managed IT and Cloud Based Computing Solutions. 

Every website needs a host. It's your online real estate, and the decision to choose quality web hosting is just as important as choosing a location for your physical retail shop. Unfortunately too few businesses owners understand the importance or the difference between hosts, and their businesses suffer greatly for their uninformed decisions.

A retail shop knows they can't just pick a cheap hole in an alleyway and get the same traffic as the expensive shopfront on the main street. Paying more in rent can result in vastly increased sales – a sound investment. Similarly quality web hosting can make a marked difference in the performance and results of your website. If you expect to make money from your site, whether through direct sales or just strong marketing from it, you need a quality web host worthy of your business.

So what do you look for in quality web hosting?

1.      Supported technology – its no good having a web host if they don't support the technology you require. Seek advice from your web designer – most sites these days need at least PHP and SQL, you may have a few other requirements.

2.      Uptime Guarantee – Reliability is essential and assessing can get quite technical. If they offer a 99% or better uptime guarantee (time that your website is online, not "down") you can assume they've got the major bases covered.

3.      Server status page – Quality web hosts aren't afraid to let you see the status of their servers, and it also shows they have some level of monitoring  – so they probably know about problems and are fixing them before you notice.  Ask if you can see it, it's a good litmus test.

4.      Unlimited plans – A lot of cheap web hosts offer 'unlimited' plans. They rely on packing many many sites onto one server and know most people use only a very small amount of resources. You can expect to be chucked in with all kinds of sites, some of which are doing malicious things which gets your IP address identified as a nasty, harming your reputation. You will also notice poor performance as your neighbours consume massive amounts of resources, leaving not enough for your site to function properly.

5.      Technical support – Things go wrong with IT all the time. You can't hold that against a web host. But when it does you need to know you can quickly and easily reach a good support team who will work hard to fix it for you.

6.      Domain Ownership – A lot of cheap web hosts offer free domain registration when you sign up. But watch out – many register it in their own name so they own the domain, not you. This can make changing hosts later very hard, and you have little recourse if they then jack up domain prices to stupidly high levels on renewal – we've seen this a number of times before. Make sure your domain is registered in your name – it's the core of your online identity.

 7.      Up to date software – Running old, out of date software is a significant security risk, harms performance and may limit what you can do with your site. Ask your web designer to confirm they are running up to date versions of Apache, PHP, SQL and kernel.

8.      Control Panel – Most business owners are not technical, so to manage the web server you need a good control panel. Cpanel is excellent. Plesk is very good. Most importantly ensure you and/or your web designer can easily navigate and manage the server via the control panel provided.

 9.      Additional extras – Be careful about what is included in your package so you don't get stung with lots of little additional extra charges. A cheap host may not be so cheap once they charge you extra for DNS, for each email account, to restore backups and all the other little things a quality web host would just include in one simple price.

10.  Reputation – most importantly, confirm your host has a positive reputation. A single bad review is not the end of the world, but many complaints about a host is an obvious sign to steer clear. Google is your friend.

Overall, take the advice of your web designer. They deal with these things all the time. Many designers offer quality web hosting on a server they know for a fact does everything you need, is well supported and they can control easily. Saving a few dollars on 'cheap' low quality web hosting can end up costing you a lot of money in lost sales, burned reputation or technical hassles. If you are running a business be prepared to pay a business class price so you can expect a business class service.

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