4 Important Points To Consider When Choosing A Web Hosting Service

Your choice of web hosting service lays the groundwork for your site’s future success. How do you make a choice? We suggest you consider using the following four, important criteria.

Customer Satisfaction

On the Internet, is the hosting company’s name attached to more compliments or complaints? Are people only slightly annoyed by a problem, or are they so upset that they vow never to use the hosting company again? When doing your research, stay away from suspicious hosting review sites that often are little more than commissioned marketing sites disguised to look like journalism.

Technical Support

Would you feel comfortable living in a town where the police, fire, and ambulance services were off-duty and unavailable in the middle of the night? Then why would you choose a hosting company that doesn’t offer technical support 24 hours a day? Many hosting companies outsource their technical support, while others insist on maintaining an in-house support staff. The former is cheaper, but the latter may give you more peace of mind. How many ways do they offer for you to contact their tech staff? And, when you do contact the tech staff, will you be able to speak with an actual person, especially someone thoroughly knowledgeable about servers?

Ease of Use

Navigating the learning curve for using the hosting company’s interface shouldn’t require a PhD. Does the company use such customer-friendly programs as cPanel or Plesk? The easier the interface the less time you’ll spend asking questions to tech support. Some hosts, such as Sparknode, offer a virtual tour of their interfaces, which gives you a good look at what you will need to work with on a regular basis. If it seems a bit too much, trust your instinct and move on.

Features

Does the web hosting service offer aggressive protection against spam? Are there programs such as MySQL, PHP and Perl that you would want to install that the web hosting service either doesn’t allow at all or allows only after special request? You have to decide whether or not the answer to that question is a deal breaker or not. For example, if your site is going to accept sensitive information such as credit card numbers, then you would only choose a web host that offered a secure server (SSL).

Finding the the best wed hosting service does not need to be an overwhelming task. Now that you are aware of what to look for, it’s simply a matter of choosing the one that best fits your particular needs.