What Will Your Website Need?
Before shopping for a web hosting provider, figure out what your website will need. Consider what your expected traffic volume will be, storage requirements, and any special features or applications your website may require. To get the best fit, you must know what you need.
Traffic Volume
Any of the plans offered by well-known web hosting companies will provide enough bandwidth to accommodate the needs of most new websites. Unless you expect many thousands of visitors each day (which is extremely rare for a new website) or intent to use your website as a busy streaming service or ecommerce site with tons of traffic and many items, you’ll probably do just fine within an entry-level plan.
Storage Space
All the files, images, graphics, videos, text, and such will take up space in your web hosting plan. The good news is that even the entry-level plans on the popular providers will be more than enough to accommodate everything you need for most websites (unless you plan on building the next YouTube, Ebay, or something of that sort which will require massive storage space.)
WordPress
If you plan to use WordPress for your website (which I recommend) make sure your chosen host offers something like 1-click WordPress installation. They may call it something different. What you’re looking for is a host that will easily install WordPress for your website without you having to manually do it the old-fashioned way. This will save you an incredible amount of time and potential headaches. Many hosts offer this service and I’d avoid the ones that don’t.
SSL Certificate
This is a security feature that has become the norm for websites now, not an optional exception. You want a host that not only offers the SSL Certificate, but that makes it very easy to get and install – ideally this should be seamless to you. Some hosts will offer this as an option or an upcharge. Some will include it in the basic service. Having to pay extra isn’t so much of a dealbreaker. Having to jump through hoops to get it setup would be a dealbreaker for me.
You will want at least one email address for the domain of your website. This is an address like john @ mywebistename.com vs John @ gmail.com. You can always point this email address to your personal email (gmail or whatever) if you choose. But, you’ll soon find it very handy to have at least one email for website administration stuff that isn’t comingled with your personal email. Some web hosting providers include a number of email boxes or unlimited email boxes in their packages. Other hosts offer email as an add-on service at an additional cost.
Performance
There are two key performance factors for web hosting: reliability and speed. You want it to work and you want it to work fast.
Reliability
Reliability refers to the webhost ensuring that everything they are responsible for will be working properly all the time so that visitors will not reach a blank page or error page when they try to visit your site. A quality web host will have a track record of 99% uptime or higher. The higher the better. This means that the server your website lives on will be up and running at least 99% of the time.
Speed
Speed defines how fast a page will load when a visitor types in your URL or clicks a link to your website. No one wants to wait 5 or 10 seconds for a page to load. And, if it’s a website they don’t have a strong desire to be on, they will likely get frustrated and move on to another website. If you are going to the electric company website to pay your electric bill, you might tolerate a little delay in the page loading. After all, you have to pay the bill, and this is the only website where you can do that. But, if you’ve clicked a link that looked interesting, but you have no relationship with that website or absolute need to be there, you’re probably going to go elsewhere if it seems like it’s taking forever to load.
What Can You Afford?
Prices vary among web hosts and prices also vary among the different types of web hosting they offer. The big players in web hosting usually have pricing that is comparable. When you get into smaller hosts or niche hosting providers, the pricing tends to increase significantly. I suggest sticking with the bigger players like Hostinger, Bluehost, Hostgator, and such.
Each of these hosts, and their competitors, will offer different types of hosting including; shared hosting, vps hosting, dedicated hosting, and cloud hosting. Shared is by far the cheapest type of hosting and it will work just fine for vast majority of new websites. Check out this article that breaks down the different types of web hosting.
What is the Price for the Longest Term Available?
This is the KEY to getting the best pricing for web hosting. Hosts offer the best pricing for your initial purchase. For instance, the price available when you sign up might be $5 per month and the regular price, which is what you’ll pay when you renew, is $15 per month. We want to get as many months for that discounted price as we possible can. Using this example, if we sign up for 1 year, we’re going to start paying the regular price after the first year. If we can sign up for that discounted price for 3 years, we won’t start paying the high renewal price until 3 years from now.
Different hosts offer different length options. Some may only let you sign up for one year while others will let you go ahead and buy 3 (or more) years of hosting at the discounted rate. You will have to pay upfront for whatever term you choose, but it is such a significant savings, it is well worth it.
Let’s take the above example and do the math. If we buy one year of hosting it will cost $60. Our renewal price for year two and year three will each be $180. That’s a total of $420 for three years (60 + 180 + 180.) But, if we pay for three years up-front, the cost will be $180. We don’t have to worry about renewing it for 3 years and we saved a whole bunch of money.
If you compare a few hosts, look at what the total cost will be for 2 or 3 years based on the discounted sign-up price (for as long as you can get it) and the renewal price. This is important because the discounted sign-up price might be awesome, but the renewal price might be so high that it makes the long-term price much higher.
Reviews and Ratings
Why not learn from other people’s experiences without having to suffer through them yourself? An easy way to do that is to look at reviews from TRUSTED sources and on TRUSTED platforms. There are plenty of written reviews and video reviews of every web hosting service you might be considering. (If you can’t find a single review on the host you’re looking at – that’s a sign that you might want to move on to another option.)
Reviews come in a few varieties: dedicated reviews, like a video or blog article dedicated to reviewing the product and then platform reviews which are what you see on a product or company listing like Google or Amazon where many customers each share a rating and written blurb about their experience with the product.
Dedicated reviews can be helpful if you know or trust the source. When it comes to review platforms, look at sites like Trustpilot, the Better Business Bureau, or Google and pay attention to the number of reviews and overall ratings as well as recent written reviews. I wouldn’t pay much attention to the ratings or reviews listed on the seller’s website or sites you’ve never heard of that seem to be just selling rather than reviewing.
Evaluating Customer Support
Customer support is difficult to evaluate when you’re shopping for web hosting services. You really won’t know how good it is until you need it. What you can evaluate is the availability of contact channels available (chat, email, phone) and the hours of support (ideally 24/7.) At some point you are bound to face an issue with any product or service – whether it’s a problem or just something you can’t figure out. The distinguishing factor here is how the company will help you resolve that problem when it arises. When you’re looking at reviews and ratings, pay attention to what existing customers say about their experience with support.
Final Thoughts on Choosing Web Hosting
You don’t want to get stuck with a clunky, crappy, or unreliable web host. Doing a little homework up-front will save you a ton of time and money in the long run. Make sure any host you consider does all the things you need (supports your traffic, offers one-click WordPress installation, SSL, email, and so on), look at reviews and ratings, see what kind of support is available, and check out the pricing and how long of a term you can sign up for at the discounted rate (if available.)
I’ve used many web hosts over the years ranging from awful to awesome – most of them fell in the mediocre range. Based on my research and experience, I recommend Hostinger.
Check out this article to see why I think Hostinger is the best web hosting.
