A Web Hosting Checklist: How to Choose a Web Host

LAST UPDATED: December 14, 2021 • POSTED IN: ,

If you’re a beginner and just starting a website, then choosing a web host will be quite a difficult mission. A good web host plays a very important role in the growth of your website or business.

If you count on hosting providers in the market you will land in the ocean. Therefore, there are a lot of factors you should consider, and which can help you select the best one for you from this big variety.

This single decision will determine your website loading speed, bandwidth, downtime, sales & leads, and much more.

In this blog post, we’ll be discussing 10 points (web hosting checklist) that will help you to find a good web host.

There are a few questions you should ask yourself before choosing a web hosting service that will satisfy your needs.

Understand what you need

You have to understand your needs before choosing a web host.

  • What kind of features does it require?
  • How much budget do you want to spend?
  • Do you need email accounts or not?
  • What is the minimum speed requirement? etc.
  • What about daily backups
  • Do you need shared space, private server, or dedicated server?
  • What will be the server location

You can find answers to these questions from many reviews and articles about web hosting.

 Choose a web host based on their offerings

  • Does a web host offer a cPanel control panel?
  • Is it easy to install WordPress or Joomla?
  • Does it provide unlimited storage space and bandwidth?
  • Does it have 24/7 technical support & customer service? etc.

These are all things you should take into account when selecting a web host

How to Choose a Web Hosting (Checklist)

1. Find a web host with a great reputation

It’s very important to consider the reputation of a web host when choosing one.

There are lots of ways to look at this but we recommend looking at customer feedback, support service, pricing, uptime, and other factors.

A web host with a bad reputation might seem as cheap but they could also cause some problems later.

2. Server Speed

You should choose web hosting if its servers are fast and can serve content to users very quickly across the globe. So it depends basically if you consider Bluehost as your hosting provider it’s not compulsory that users from North America will get the same speed as compared to users from Asia.

Why? because servers are hosted in a specific region. In such cases, you should consider CDNs

The best way to make your site faster is to use a CDN (Content Delivery Network). It will help you to load the content from different servers around the world and thus reduce the time it takes to load the page.

Recommended Read: 15 Powerful Ways to Speed Up WordPress Website

If you are using WordPress, then it can be done easily by using different plugins.

3. Web Host Price

You should choose web hosting if it fits into your pocket. Pricing is another key factor to consider while choosing a web host for your website. In addition, you need to check the features and services that are offered by them.

If you have a small business or an individual blog, then shared web hosting will be enough for you. However, if your user base is huge maybe more than 1 million visits per month, then dedicated servers are better suited for you.

If you are looking for cheap web hosting, then you can go with one of the free web hosts like InfinityFree, WordPress.com, etc.

Recommended Read: Shared Hosting vs WordPress Hosting 

4. Web Host Support

While choosing a web host you must look after their customer support service. If the hosting company offers 24/7 customer support over mail & chat then it is better to choose them.

For instance, we made some changes due to which your website got down and you are not able to login or think of you want to upgrade some core modules of the servers.

Credit: bluehost.com

If your website gets hacked then you will lose your reputation in no time which may lead to loss of business.

Therefore, it’s super important to look at the customer support service especially over chat and phone.

5. Downtime

The market standard of average uptime guarantee is 99.8% to 99.9% depending upon host to host. Just think of if your website is gathering thousands of visitors per day and your website goes down for a few minutes only then there will be a huge loss and you’ll lose a lot of money.

Moreover, you can read how much amazon loses per minute in the downtime.

6. Age of Webhost

Never trust a 3-month-old web hosting company promising 100% uptime and the fastest servers in the market.

While choosing a web host for your website you must consider the age of the web host. I mean from how much time the company is serving its services.

7. Hidden Charges

Hosting companies charge different amounts of money in order to provide the service and they should be honest about it. You can easily discover the hidden cost from their site or contact them directly. 

Hidden charges can be like 

  • Charges for website migration.
  • Charges to recover website from a hacking attack.

It is very important that you know what kind of services are provided by the hosting company so that you don’t get caught up with any surprise charges. 

8. Space they provide

If you’re having a small static website that doesn’t need regular updates then 3-5GB of disk space is enough for you. But if you’re having an e-commerce website or a blog then you must think of how much space do I need?

In shared hosting, typically you get 30GB of space in basic plans which is more than enough for a single website.

If somehow you ran out of space then you have to face unwanted charges and downtime while upgrading your plan. Therefore I would suggest you must think of the amount of space you need or you can choose a plan with “Unlimited Disk Space” as I did 😉

9. Bandwidth they provide

What if your host allows 10,000 visits monthly? Your website will crash at that moment, right? Which is not a good idea.

Therefore, you must consider the bandwidth of your hosting plan. Ideally, unmetered bandwidth is what most hosting providers offer nowadays.

10. Renewal Charges

This is what no one talks about. Renewal Charges.

When you buy a hosting plan for your website you pay a certain amount (I believe discounted price). but what about renewal charges?

web-host-high-renewal-charges

Hosting companies offer initial plans with huge discounts but charges you almost 2x or maybe 3x the price you paid in beginning during renewals.

Mostly all companies follow this standard of high renewal rates. Therefore, you should consider buying web hosting for at least 3 years or migrate your website to another host when it comes to renewal.

Conclusion (Web Hosting Checklist)

Finally coming to the conclusion, I would say if you are looking for a reliable web host then I suggest you go with Bluehost or a2Hosting.

They have an excellent customer support team that will help you out in every possible way. They have been providing quality services for many years and they are one of the most trusted names in the field of web hosting.

You can also avail of their discounts on their annual plans. If you want to know more about Bluehost check this review.

At last, I would say before buying any web hosting you should definitely consider the above web hosting checklist.

Selecting the best web hosting service is very crucial for your website, its speed, security, search engine ranking, depends on this decision.

I hope it was helpful for you guys.

Thank you

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