Looking to find a good hosting service? Is the band or disk space available more important? RAM or CPU? Is a shared hosting sufficient? But above all, which hosting provider should you choose? When it’s time to publish a new site and choose server hosting, if you do not have previous experience, it will be tricky to do so. The huge number of suppliers (which in many cases are simple retailers) and offers make life difficult for those who simply want a place to host their site and sleep peacefully.
In this article, I will explain the main aspects to consider when making the delicate journey to finding hosting for your site, I repeat for your site. It is not in fact to find the best hosting overall, a company that may prove impossible to find. Above all, it’s to help you in choosing the most suitable option for your needs.
At the end of the article, you will also find a list of the most common pitfalls to pay attention to when buying a hosting service.
How do you make the right choice when it comes to buying a hosting service? The definitive solution obviously does not exist, but it may be useful to keep some points in mind; let’s see which ones.
Hosting for work or for leisure?
Does the web space you intend to purchase serve for business purposes or for simple entertainment? This is the first question you have to ask yourself when choosing the supplier and the offer. In many cases, people invest thousands of dollars in the development or in the graphics of a site but then they rush to save money when it comes to choosing hosting. If you use the site to do e-commerce or to allow potential customers to contact you to request a quote, think about how much it might cost you to have a site that is slow to navigate or completely unattainable for a day.
Do a search
In the first case, it is necessary to consider the work performed to interpret the language (for example PHP), perform the various operations and perform the numerous queries to the database server. Before purchasing a hosting service, try to see if there is someone on the Internet who has had positive or negative experiences with the provider. Try also to do a search on Google, using the name of the chosen hosting provider to see if there are people who have posted positive or negative notes about it. If you want more information about GoDaddy, you should read about GoDaddy hosting reviews before buying.
Ask the supplier for information before buying
It is advisable to try to contact the hosting provider before purchasing the service. If something is not clear or if you want to be sure that the web space has the features you need, send an email or a request to the pre-sales assistance service and evaluate both the response time and the degree of completeness. These can be useful elements to understand how the supplier would respond if future problems happened.
Also check if additional features are provided such as:
– a data backup service;
– the possibility of being compensated if the service does not satisfy us (after an initial trial period);
– 24-hour assistance or only during office hours;
– the type of control panel offered, the most common ones are Plesk and Cpanel;
– the ability to upgrade or downgrade your plan if you need more or less resources;
– is the SSL certificate provided and installed for free?
– a forum dedicated to users or a particularly well-attended help section where it is easy to find the solution to the most common problems.
Almost all providers offer different types of hosting: low-end, mid-range and high-end plans. Sometimes these plans differ from each other only for the disk space or available bandwidth. In other cases, they also differ for other features such as the dedicated RAM memory or the allocated CPU quota.
Being able to have an easily scalable plan is certainly advantageous as it allows you to have more resources in a very short time without having to necessarily transform your data on a new server.
