You are ready to set up your website or start your own internet business and you begin to search for a web hosting company. Now simply what are the parameters in choosing a web hosting company?
The following criteria will help in your evaluation:
Customer support
When evaluating a web hosting company, don’t just look at the cost, or the storage size or the bandwidth, inquire about their customer support. A first-rate service should have first-rate customer support. Check if the web hosting services provider is there to support you 24/7 and will give you immediate help from its technicians if ever problems arise.
Guaranteed Uptime
Make sure if there is an uptime guarantee. A first-rate provider will also have a money-back guarantee in place. There are also free services, discounts as indemnity for a downtime. A web hosting company that stays away from taking responsibility is a clear signal that it won’t put effort into providing good service.
There’s a big difference between a companies that guarantees 99% uptime vs. another company which guarantees 98%. In the first company, your website will be down for 87.6 hours per year while with the second one (98%), your site will be down for 175.2 hours per year. See! That’s a whopping 87.6 hours difference for a 1% variation.
Don’t go for a company declaring 100% uptime, as that would be quite impossible. If anyone would ever state their server has a 100% uptime, then they are either simply lying to you or they are not doing the needed upgrades for their server.
Backups
Ensure that the company is doing the scheduled backups. Every hosting company could be hit by a technical failure.
Bandwidth, Web space, And Price
Now, these are the things that most people would immediately look at especially the price. Be quick to see who is offering the impossible like unlimited bandwidth? Unlimited web space.
Value-added services
Well, to make life simpler, you might want to have some auto-installer scripts that will save you time. Scripts like image galleries for your photos, script for the forum, in case you might need one, blog scripts, etc. There are also website builders that some hosting companies have included.