How do you choose the right host, for your website?
It’s a hard question, because you can find out by asking other people who they prefer, it often gives a little info about how their service have been, and it can be a good indicator, if you should choose a company or not.
But one thing I don’t really like on forums is the sentence: “It’s the best hosting company in the world“.
First of all, how can it be best? What is best? Is it best in price, service, support, uptime, speed?
We all have different websites, different customer base, different needs, in fact – nothing is the same.
You’ll hear a lot of times, that a company is the best, people never tell why, which might be bad, because if you don’t know what the guy thinks is best, it might be something that you don’t need. Some people want excellent support, others want cheap hosting, some might need high performance, or some people just want the ‘average’.
So when you’re looking for a host, you should tell, what your needs is, if you already know where your target is, it would be great – so going in-dept what you need, makes it easier to help out finding the right provider for a specific site. No hosting company, can fit the needs for every single person in the world, because we’re all different and want different things.
One thing you also should keep in mind, is how the hosting company promotes itself, often they will promote their own company, as the best in the world, having the best service, best support, best speed, and best uptime. Nothing is wrong, and best of all, it’s only 1-2$ a month.
Honestly, this isn’t really true, you can’t give the best of everything, especially not if the price is low as well.
I’ve personally seen hosts promoting themselves as the fastest hosting company, but taking some sites, testing the speed of the sites, based on 10 tests on a dedicated testing machine, see some results, put it on another host, and see the sites backend go from 3 seconds to 600ms, and with memcached enabled, seeing load times less than 100ms – really shows the facts about companies might tell they’re the fastest, but you should test it out first, because it might not be the case.
Also it’s important to check, if the provider, does overselling or not, and to check how much ressources they actually allocate to you as a customer. – The reason to check this, is because the more customers on same server, means less CPU time, and memory to each customer, it slows down your website, makes your customers unsatisfied, and might in the end cost you more money.
It’s not about how many domains you have on a server, it’s about how many customers, and how many ressources is on the server. Because you can have 100 domains, where only 20 of the domains is active, and the last 80 domains is just 301s to the 20 domains. This redirects isn’t heavy at all. The only thing that matters here is the 20 sites.
But you can also have 100 domains on a server, where all of them is active, this will give a much higher load on the server, because all 100 domains, contain a website. So by looking at the number of customers, instead of sites give you a much better view, of if the server is having a low amount of customers or not.
So paying more for hosting, often gives you a better product, because you have less customers on each server, which means more ressources – results in faster websites. If you pay 1-2$ yes, you can get proper hosting, but don’t expect that your site will be loading blazing fast, because it’s not going to happen.
Personally I think, paying more for a hosting, that gives you a product that kick ass, is really the way to go, it might cost more, but the chances you get more, is also bigger.
But spend some time, looking for the right company, that can host your site, explain people what your needs is, what you’re expecting, and what you’re gonna do, it will make it more clear to people that help out. And if someone ever says ‘this is the best’ then ask them why, and let them explain why they think a specific host is the best for them.
You might know that I’m the owner of Hosting4Real. Am I the best host? I don’t know, because I don’t know what you need, want cheap hosting? No then I’m not the right choice. But for some customers we’ve delivered a perfect product, that fits their needs. And that’s important, that we have a small amount of customers, we really can give the service they need, and they fit our service.
I’m always happy to recommend a host, I can only talk about my experience, and it might not fit what you need. But in the end, no one is the best for everybody, because we’re all different.