How to choose web hosting

1. Choose an aim or purpose and know your needs.

Before you think about looking at different hosting packages, have a think about what you need your hosting to achieve.

Ask yourself simple questions such as;

• How big is your site going to be? Roughly how many pages will you have and how much content will you add?
• How much traffic do you expect to generate every month?
• Will you just be hosting one website? Or do you want multiple sites? Some hosting services offer multi-sites on one package.
• What software will you be using? For instance WordPress. A lot of companies have automatic WordPress installers.
• What is your budget or how much are you prepared to pay monthly or annually?

Once you’ve worked out your rough estimates on what you think you’re going to need, it’s time to look at all the different hosting companies out there and decide which one is best for you.

2. Shopping around

It’s a bit like looking for car insurance. Always have a look around to find out who offers the best specifications and options for the price point you’re looking for. Most hosting companies will offer similar packages at similar prices so you should have an easy time comparing.

There is one factor that you really want to consider and that’s speed and reliability. There is nothing worse than having to continuously contact your hosting provider because your website is either performing badly or not at all. Search engines will monitor your website and if they can’t access your website because it’s offline, they’ll rank you negatively.

The best place to check the reliability of your hosting is social media and reviews. Do a quick search for the hosting provider and see what people are saying. If the comments and posts are all negative then you can almost bet they offer a poor service.

Remember though, people are far more likely to leave a bad comment or review than a positive one.

3. Customer Support

Whatever you do, do not choose a provider that does not offer customer support. If your website goes down (it happens!) or you need help with your hosting for one reason or another, customer support is an absolute lifeline.

Look for providers who offer either 24/7 customer support via Live Chat or Support Tickets. Phone support is always great too but just check there’s no extra charges on calls.

4. Looking to the future

For the majority of people, you’re going to start out small. You’ll probably end up choosing a starter hosting package on a shared server. This will be absolutely fine to start, but what if your website grows exponentially and all of a sudden you’re going over your bandwidth limits or your disk space is full because your email enquires are going off the chain?

You need to know that your hosting service offers upgrades. It’d be silly for them not to have this option because in essence it makes them more money, but you never know.

Check the packages they offer above the one you’re choosing. If it’s a big jump in resources then great, you know they can accommodate you as your website grows.

5. Our Recommendation

If you’re really stuck for options and you’re just not sure where to go, we do have our personal recommendation. Our recommended hosting company is FastComet.

Quick Disclaimer: The links above are affiliate links, should you decide to click them and purchase hosting with FastComet we will receive commission.

But seriously, we have nothing but good things to say about FastComet. Their starter package is slightly more expensive than other starter packages but there’s a reason for that. FastComet guarantee server performance, there’s no limiting resources or shoving you on overloaded servers. With some other hosting companies, as soon as you hit your limits they’ll take your site down without warning. Basically, you’ll get what you pay for!

Based on their starter package, 15GB of SSD storage has surpassed every other hosting company we’ve tried. Guaranteed server resources mean that even though you’re on shared hosting you’re not going to feel the effects of someone else hogging all the performance. There are tons of options for getting the best performance out of your website as well, such as automatic Google PageSpeed compression of images (trust us, it’s a good thing to have!).

They even have 24/7 Live Chat support, though we’ve never had to use it!

We can quite happily say we’re yet to have any issues with FastComet and we will continue to use them for the foreseeable future.

We know hosting can be a bit of a confusing topic but we are always here to help new and existing clients. We could go into a lot more depth than you see here in this blog so if you’re looking for more information then please do get in touch.

Phone us on: 01362 851118

Email us at: info@jemmettfoxmedia.com

OR visit our contact page and fill out our contact form.