Finding A Good Hosting Company
It can be insanely difficult to find a good hosting company that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg. Not too long ago, I wrote a review of all the hosting companies I went through before I found one that was really worth my money.
I’ve learned several things about what’s needed in a good host and if you want to take the short route and find a good host without having to go through five or six, here are some tips for you.
Technology Support
In this day and age, you’d think host would be able to support the simplest of things. However, I’ve run into several hosts that couldn’t even handle setting up a simple instal of WordPress. And don’t even think about using htaccess on some of these either. Do a comprehensive check on the host, and if possible, talk to some people who use the same package. Do they support the latest technologies? Do they run the latest version of PHP? Are you allowed to configure the backend and even add scripts on? What about the database? Can it handle a load. These items are the most important things to consider when finding a host.
Space, Transfer and Speed
The cool thing for cheap advertising companies to do nowadays is to offer “unlimited space” and “unlimited bandwidth”. Let me tell you something though – NOTHING is every truly unlimited. Yes, you may be able to store all 100 TB of photos and movies on your server, but what happens when you try to navigate the site? What happens when the neighbor on your shared server decides to take up all the space? His actions (or yours) might end up crashing the whole server and causing you to lose potential business.
It’s fine to use these companies, just be aware you’re taking a gamble. I much rather have my host give each person a specific limit to the amount of space and bandwidth the can use, that way there’s less chance to crash the server.
Also, watch how quickly your site loads on each server. At one time, one of my sites took over 20 seconds to load on GoDaddy, 4 seconds on Bluehost, and 1 second on ZeHosting. Who do you think I ended up with?
Price
Pricing varies widely on hosts, especially for shared accounts. I’ve seen shared hosting cost anywhere from $3/month to $50/month. More expensive isn’t always better though, so don’t pick a server based on price alone. I try to aim for a price in the middle, as $3 hosts most likely have terrible service and $50 hosts are likely to be overpriced and offer no additional features than say, a $10/month host.
Support
No matter how awesome the hosting company is, it’s inevitable that you’ll need to speak to support at one point or another. So before you decide what host to go with, try out their support section. How long does it take them to get back to you? Are they friendly? Knowledgeable?
I’ve used ZeHosting‘s support at least a hundred times – everything for downtime (happened only once!), to customizing my email server, to installing custom PHP scripts, to basically customizing anything I needed to run all of the apps I have. They’re awesome, I can get ahold of them almost immediately any time of the day or even on weekends.
Your Thoughts
How do you go about looking for a host? What factors into your decision?
About the author
Amber Weinberg specializes in clean and semantic XHTML, CSS and WordPress development. She has over 10 years of coding experience and is pretty cool to work with. Amber is available for freelance work, so why not hire her for your next project?
Great post.
I completely agree with you on the pricing because I’ve experienced it myself. I went with cheaper and suffered for it. However, you get what you pay for.
Yup, sometimes it’s worth to pay the extra money.
I always want to entire control on server. Having a dedicated server costs a lot and most of us will never need. I decided to buy a vps server. my hosting company only offers cpannel as of pre-installed panel and you have to pay for extra. So, I installed webmin free edition. (I did it by myself because I’m a system administrator too, but you can find someone else to install around $30-40 on freelance work sites.)
I can do anything on the server and that peace of mind worth paying a little more.
Oh yea, if you can afford a dedicated server and really need something like that, go for it. Personally, I don’t see the need for it in my business, as a shared plan works fine for my business and dev server, and I can’t justify spending $100 a month for dedicated.
I personally love Host Gator. I’ve been using them for the past few years now and their support has been great.
I was with another host before hosted in Australia and they really sucked. The support sucked and it tool them ages to get back.
Host Gator has a lot of stuff to customise your server. Not total control of course if you are on a shared plan like me. But defiantly enough for most stuff you need to do. Even includes support for Ruby if you need it.
They are around the $8 – $10 p/m mark. Pretty good price for what you get.
Host Gator was pretty nice when I was with them. I just prefer ZeHosting because they’re a much smaller company, so you can talk to the same person every time and you get more personable help.
I’m with Hostgator too, I did have a few shared packages but there is an inode limit so big sites quickly outgrow them.
I currently have a nice sized VPS which does the job nicely
For the past 5 years I’ve been using dedicated servers with SoftLayer.
These guys are really great, a solid and fast network and tech support which is really competent and fast.
They also provide a good customer portal, allowing you to customise new servers and have them up and running within a couple of hours.
They went through a few name changes/mergers recently. I think they used to be RackShack, but then were EV1, ThePlanet, and more recently SoftLayer.
If you’re looking for shared hosting, or some cheap $10 a month deal, they arent for you. But for a solid dedicated server with high capacity network, they’re great
Good Post
Unlimited Bandwidth/Disc Space is currently the vain of my life, even though its a physical impossibility some clients seem to think it gives them peace of mind, but in reality it a big sign that the web host is overselling it’s resources.
A better tactic when looking for hosting is basing it the bandwidth pool/uplink (Or amount of bandwidth a second) and server specs a web host offers…or just going for a dedicated server
I’ve been with This* web host for a good bit now, and have loved them. They respond within the day, or at the latest the next. Their pricing plans are also great, avg at $6-$10/month.
For me it is important that I have a host that I can ask anything, any moment of the day and I did find it in a small company. It’s a company thatis also close by, so they speak Dutch so for me that is better to communicate with on technical stuff. Also very important for me is that if I want something specil for a client, that my host can do that. They can. I’m very glad with my hostng. Th ey most imporatnt thing of good hostign is that they are easy to contact and that you get good help.
When it comes to a host, I look for technology support (is it latest and greatest?) and how good the support team is. I’m with HostGator and they kick ass. I have a site with no traffic right now on the shared hosting plan, but they do have dedicated hosting plans as well. Though, I wouldn’t be paying for dedicated hosting unless I was making oodles of money and the traffic warranted it.
I’ve contacted the support team a few times and they are always on the money.
as for understanding the differences between shared servers, dedicated servers and Virtual Private Servers…see this article that I wrote for Chris Hope’s Electric Toolbox — http://www.electrictoolbox.com/choosing-right-web-hosting-plan/