Choosing a Web Hosting Company & a Plan

When choosing a Web hosting company one of the main key indicators is to see their client’s satisfactory reviews and the price which is also important. As technologies and hosting industry changes too often and fast for an expert, we should be aware to check with following criteria’s.

• Server Reliability / Uptime Scores – The most important point to know here is whether they have a 24×7 operating web host. You need a web host to operate on a powerful server and have stable network connections. Close to 99.5% and above is the recommended uptime score; anything below 99% is unacceptable.
• A company that supports Multiple Add-on Domains.
• Price of Hosting Signup and Renewal Cost. Hosting deals and shared hosting especially are normally selling very cheap on signup prices, but charge much higher on renewals.
• What Refund Policy they are offering? – If you choose to cancel your host within the trial period, what are the implications? Does the company provides a full money refund? What is the hosting company’s refund policy after the trial session? Are there any cancellation charges?
• Easy to use Hosting Control Panel. A user-friendly and functional hosting control panel is very important.
• Account Suspension – What are the limitations? Here’s a money tip that most hosting review sites will not tell you – Hosting companies will pull the plug and suspend your account if you are using too much CPU power (yes, unlimited hosting is limited) or violating the rules.
• Do they offer Backup. Are they free of charge?
• Do they have 24/7/365 Live Chat Support.

Choose a Web Hosting Plan

Before choosing the right hosting plan, you should know what you need, a Windows OS based hosting or a Linux OS based hosting. This choice depends on the coding language that your website has. If it is ASP, it should certainly be a Windows based hosting and should also have an IIS server installed in it. If it has any other programming languages like PHP, Perl, Ruby, then you should go with Linux based hosting.
After you have decided on the type of hosting (Windows or Linux), you should define the right hosting plan.
You should take into consideration the following factors −

• Disk Space
• Bandwidth
• Number of Hosted Domains
• Number of Subdomains
• Parked Domains
• Versions of PHP, MySQL and Perl.

The main plans in general are as follows −

Shared Hosting

It is the most basic plan that every hosting provider offers. Shared hosting is fundamentally many hosting accounts located on one server. Some of them share the same IP address (although a dedicated IP address is often available for an additional fee). This plan will always offer a specific set of features and will always have resource limits. If you are not certain, then it will be better to start with a limited plan and later upgrade it after the website grows and gets more traffic.

VPS Hosting

VPS is a Virtual Private Server. This refers to the partitioning of a physical server into multiple servers where each one acts just like a dedicated server, each has its own operating system and can be rebooted separately. These operating systems receive a specific share of the resources of the physical server and they are isolated from each other. There are two types of VPS hosting −

• Managed − Managed means that the patching is done by the hosting company by offering a CPanel in it.
• Unmanaged − Unmanaged is a hosting where you should take care of your VPS in everything and there is no CPanel in it.

Dedicated Hosting

This is the most powerful type of hosting, which meets the requirements and needs of big businesses. Dedicated server owners can sell hosting services for a profit. They can choose the server specifications and environment. If you have heavy traffic, a very popular site, or a large customer database, then consider Dedicated Hosting. A dedicated server also provides more freedom to send emails and stream media.
TIPS − The most important thing in hosting is to check prices of different Hosting Companies and their hosting plans prices with comparison websites for a better understanding. An example of a comparison website for checking prices of hosting companies is – http://www.hostmonk.com/.