There are thousands of web hosting providers to choose from and all of them are thirsty for adding your business to their portfolio, in this situation how do you identify and distinguish the best from the worse web hosting providers. Below I have highlighted some key points to consider when choosing a web hosting provider.
Security
The security of your website is the most important thing to consider once your site goes live, you should be 100% confident that the technology that brings your website to life is of the highest caliber and extremely secure. If you set your website to process customer details and collect payments via the internet then you should consider a hosting provider who can provide you with a server which has encryption capabilities and the ability to set up a dedicated secure server.
Server Space
Before you commit your self to a hosting provider, first consider the amount of disk space you will need to host your website, a reasonable amount is around 500 MB, to 1 GB disk space, which is sufficient enough for any small business, unless you are planning on running a software repository or an image gallery or a file sharing website. Web hosting providers offer their customers several hosting packages and many of the packages comes with un-necessary disk space for a very reasonable price in attempt to out perform their competitors in many cases I found hosting providers are cutting corners to bring customers an excellent hosting package which only looks good on paper.
Reliability
The reliability of the hosting provider is crucial. The length of time they have been in business, their percentage uptime, reasonable uptime you should expect is at least 99.5% and their backup and data retrieval practices and policies. Some hosting providers have multiple data centers, and some might even give you a choice of where your server will be located. Ideally, the closer the server is to you the better, as file transfers and interaction with the server will be at faster speeds. This might be a good question to ask the company before making a commitment.
Support
Technical support is something that should definitely be a part of a web hosting plan. Professional web hosting providers offer customers a support ticket system, this support system track all queries made by you and will automatically notify you via e-mail or SMS when your query get updated. The support system also give you access to review the status of any tickets you have raised, set priorities and check response times.
PHP/CGI-Bin
No matter what type of site you are planning on running, chances are you will eventually need to install some type of CGI script. Whether it be a mailing list management script, contact form processor, or maybe even a fancy credit card processing script, your hosting account will need to allow you to install and run them. This requires access to a special folder on your server called “CGI-Bin”. Some hosting accounts will only allow you to use “pre-installed” scripts as a security measure. These are scripts that the owners of the company have installed and configured so that they know that they will work properly and not adversely affect their server’s performance. That may be all you need, but if you have the knowledge, it’s always nice to have the ability to install your own scripts and configure them to suit your individual needs. You should also be sure that the account you choose supports the language in which your scripts are written, such as PHP, Perl, etc.
