Thinking of starting a brand new blog and looking out for the best web hosting service for your website ? What things you should keep in mind before selecting and signing up for a web hosting account ? All your questions will be answered here in this article.
1. Host uptime and reliability
This indeed should be placed at the top of the priorities as website uptime is of utmost importance. It can’t be more frustrating to see your website down because it means loss of targeted visitors and inturn leads and potential sales of your products or services. When your visitors are unable to access your website, it doesn’t leave a great impression on them and the possibility of them of them returning to your website is zilch especially if your website or blog is new and yet to be established. Added to his, we are well aware of the fact that how google frowns upon websites which are not accessible every now and then. This leads to loss in SERPs as Google wants to provide value to users and a website which is not up just hurts user experience. So to get rid of this, it’s a good idea to check out a web hosting company uptime reliabilityfrom various sources like web hosting review sites and web hosting related forums.
2. Fast Loading Servers
Nothing can be more painful for a visitor who comes to your site and your site loads slowly or loads incompletely. This agains hurts user experience and inturn increases bounce rate because these days everyone is looking for a quick solution for their problem. Why would anyone wait for your site to load for 30 seconds or 45 seconds when he can go to another websites which load quickly and provide him the same information or services you are offering ? So ensure that the web hosting you are choosing has fast loading servers even if its shared hosting. There are cases where some new and cheap web hosting companies can trick you by claiming unlimited bandwidth. Unlimited bandwidth is a misleading term. If the servers are overloaded with so many websites then the unlimited bandwidth doesn’t even matter because all websites are hogging up server resources. Good and reliable web hosting companies are known to have limited sites on their shared hosting servers thereby ensuring fast loading servers. Some examples of these reliable web hosting companies are hostgator, iPage, bluehost, fatcow, dreamhost etc.
3. Linux or Windows
When opting for a web hosting, there are generally 2 options : linux or windows. Nowadays majority of the sites and blogs today are opearting on wordpress and wordpress is written in PHP and originally developed for Linxu platform and it was later only when Windows added PHP support and after that only WordPress was able to run on a Windows server. For very this reason, it is recommended that you opt for Linux if you plan to use WordPress as you will face less technical issues on a Linux server.
4. Price
Lastly we should consider price ? Why lastly ? Simply because of the fact thatprice alone shouldn’t be set as the sole benchmark for deciding the web hosting service. The factors 1,2 and 3 are more important and it doesn’t hurt to spend an extra buck or two to keep your visitors happy. So coming to price, there are various plans when it comes to web hosting – Shared, VPS and Dedicated. In majority of the cases,shared web hosting is quite sufficient unless you have a big website with tens of thousands of visitors daily, in that scenario, you may need to opt for VPS or dedicated web hosting according to your budget and requirements. Good Luck !