When it comes to choosing a web hosting provider for your online venture, it’s crucial you choose the right one. Otherwise, you could end up with a slow website or worse, a website that’s never online. While most web hosting providers online these days are reputable and offer an excellent experience, it’s still important you do your homework before you part with your cash and website files. Here are a few of the things you should research before taking a leap of faith.
1. Pricing Structure
Many web hosting providers oversell resources they don’t have access to. This is a problem because once they’ve hit their limits, your website will experience numerous issues or downtime. Therefore, it’s crucial you pay particular attention to their pricing structure to ensure it’s not too good to be true. If a web host is selling a package for a dollar per month with unlimited resources, then they’re overselling, there’s no question about it.
2. Past Customers
You’ll want to find out what their past and present customers think of the overall service from your business since they’ve been renting space. This can be easily achieved with a simple Google search, but you could also use sites like Trust Pilot to get more information in terms of testimonials. You could also use Hosting Kingdom to get more details of the services each individual top hosting company offer.
3. What’s the Support Like?
Testing the customer support as a non-customer is perfectly acceptable, and any good host will expect it. If they have numerous support methods in place for you to get in contact with them, use them all to see what sort of response you get. Any decent host out there will respond within a couple of hours maximum, but a better host will have a phone number for you to contact them on straight away. Ask them pre-sales questions and see what kind of answers they can give you in terms of the hardware they use and how many customers they have.
4. Security Updates
The next thing you’ll want to consider is the security of the specific hosting provider. Any good host will have all the basics in place to ensure your data is protected. Also, whatever country you reside in, it’s crucial you pay attention to the registered business number, so you can do more research to see how their business is fairing. This can usually be achieved easily enough with a simple Google search, depending on the country you reside in.
5. Hardware Research
With the many tools available online, you can now research a specific host to see what hardware they’re using and how quick their networks are. You can find some of the most basic tools by clicking here.
Granted, finding a web host is especially easy these days thanks to the huge competition available. However, to save you time and money in the future, ensure you pick the right host today by taking advantage of the above tips. The last thing you want is to invest your money in a host only to have a bad experience and move all your files to a new one a month late.
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