Rating the best service providers - Web Hosting, Domain Hosting, Wordpress Hosting and Website Building - warrants a deep research into how an individual web hosting service performs in terms of speed, reliability and support. It also requires an analysis of usability and value for money, among other external factors. Here is our detailed process of review
Website hosting services are like real estate holders of internet, that you buy a peice from, for your website. If you want to have your own website, these platforms put up your website and keep it running so the customers can access it when they type in your URL. There is a wide variety of these services based on the type of plan (Shared, VPS, Dedicated, Wordpress, Cloud) and the pricing. You can choose to have monthly or annual plans, based on which the pricing can vary from INR 59/month to INR 500/month
These services attend to a plethora of businesses. Whatever your need, you can get a plan which is custom made for you. Some web hosting companies can even help you build your entire website, while others just provide you the server space for your website. You can choose a hosting platform depending on your business model, size and requirements by weighing the features on factors given below.
The larger and more complex a website is, the more comprehensive configuration package is required. The main ones are broken down as follows:
Shared Web Hosting is the most basic package offered by any company. Your website would sit on the same server along with several other websites, so you're sharing the server, and any other resources, such as memory or CPU. This services works best for basic websites such as email sending, file sharing, and basic ecommerce sites. It is also the cheapest alternative and therefore smartest option for smaller organizations or startups.
A VPS (Virtual Private Server) is designated for direct purposes, more than a what a shared server does. Mostly, you'd still be sharing a server, but this service makes a virtual server of your own. Which means all the resources are only yours, memory storage, processing power and beyond. This is safer and a much more reliable alternative that keeps the site segregated from the others while still maintaining affordability. VPS is often a great option for SaaS providers, game makers, programmers and companies that have outgrown their shared hosting.
Dedicated hosting is a very different service. In addition to getting your own server, this service also lets you take full control over that server. That means you have full access and can set things exactly the way you like it. However, this package comes with a premium suite of features that may not be needed by most of the businesses. Dedicated hosting plans are ideal for large organizations or websites with much higher traffic.
WordPress, also known as WP, is a shared hosting service that caters to a more specialized clientele. The servers are optimized differently, to have features particularly attractive to WordPress performance - faster load time, pre-installation, security features that work specifically with WordPress, and WordPress updates. Useful for businesses that have websites created on WordPress.
Without a web hosting service that suits your needs, your ability to run a successful business is going to be seriously impaired. There is a plethora of web hosting providers competing for the share of the pie. To choose the best one, you have to start by keeping the following points in mind:
Shop for a Web Hosting company after evaluating your disk space and bandwidth needs. If your site features lots of graphic heavy media, tons of pages, and large traffic flow, you're going to need decent bandwidth and disk space for smooth functioning of your website. If your site is going to be basic and not generate a huge amount of traffic, you should be able to get away with less disk space and bandwidth.
Keep compatibility in mind, as well. In the task of looking for a website hosting service provider, there is a chance that you might overlook one of the very important criteria: the type of operating systems supported by the service. You're not going to want to switch operating systems so double-check operating system compatibility before settling for a service provider.
Availability and reliability are important features to consider when looking for a web hosting platform. The best companies offer availability rates of 98 and 99 percent, frequently referred to as “uptime”. However, it's easy to make such claims, so make sure to check yourself whether these clams are actually true.
Security is a very serious concern. Choosing a service provider without knowing about its security features is a big mistake that can lead to serious consequences. Firewalls, Daily Backups, and User Authentication etc. should be included in the service package. It's also good to receive notifications, once in a while, when changes are being made to the account as it would help alert you to suspicious activity.
Now that you know what factors affect the hosting quality of a service provider, how do you evaluate those factors? Here are some features important to weigh during your decision making process.
Uptime, the percentage of time that a hosting service is up and running, is guaranteed by various companies. This is one of the most important features that tells you about the reliability of a platform because you don’t want your website being unavailable or unreachable to your customers. Therefore, never compromise on uptime.
Load time is another important feature which helps evaluate the speed and bandwidth capabilities of a service provider. Average attention span of human beings has shrunk over the years to become smaller than that of a goldfish! So, if your website takes even a drop too long to load a page, your business is dead before it even starts. Be sure your hosting service has a fast load time.
If it's middle of the night, you get a call from a client saying that your website is down. What would you do? Having an issue with your website is nothing to take lightly. Therefore you want to make sure customer service is available and competent enough to resolve your queries without a significant down time for your website.
The number of servers and their respective locations play a huge role in the speed of your website and service. The more the number of servers available, the faster the service, but where are those servers found in the world would also affect the connectivity of the servers. You should always look for servers in locations close to you.
