If you are planning to start your own blog then you should take into account these factors to consider when choosing a web hosting company for your blog.
Before we learn about the factor for selecting best web hosting we can’t neglect the free WordPress hostings for your website. In our previous post, we have seen the limitations of free WordPress hosting and why it recommended going for premium web hostings.
There are many web hosting service providers promising you various features. But the most important features that should be considered by you while choosing a web hosting for your blog and covered below.
Remember, you should always consider these features while selecting web hosting. If you don’t want to go through the complete article then this the best windows server hosting for you.
Factors to Consider When Choosing a Web Hosting Company
There are many factors that can be considered but not all of them are equally important. We have covered only the list of important factors that your web hosting company should fulfill.
1. Speed and Reliability
Speed and reliability play an utmost important role as it dictates the visitors if they want to come back to your website or not. The website with less loading time and more uptime of the server helps serving better.
The long waiting time for loading of web pages generally irritates the visitors and the visitor loses its interest after some time.
If you are going for a shared hosting account then you must be aware of what is the amount of RAM (in MB) and the total number of entry process provided by the hosting provider.
Remember the number of the entry process and availability of RAM will decide the loading time of your web pages. Reliability means in terms of the uptime of the server.
Nowadays most of the service provider provides 95% – 99.9% server uptime guarantee.
2. Total Websites Hosted on Server
If you are going for a VPS hosting or dedicated hosting then this point is not for you, but if you are planning for the shared hosting server then you have to consider this point too as it will also decide the speed of your website.
More the number of a website hosted on the server more it will be slower. Another important thing which you should keep in mind is the updating scripts on the shared hosting servers.
Confused, then let me explain you with an example. If you have a script supporting php5 and in future, you want to update the script to php7 you need you shared hosting provider to update the PHP version on his server.
It is difficult for the shared hosting providers to update the version of PHP as it might stop the execution of script of some other user. So you should be a bit careful and always go for the hosting plans dedicated to WordPress websites.
- Signup for Bluehost (exclusive Discount + Free Domain name)
- Signup for WPEngine (Best WordPress hosting)
3. Technical & Customer Support
Most of the hosting providers have a ticket system to provide support to their customers. The ticket system will take a long time to resolve your problem.
It is always recommended that the hosting provider you are choosing should have 24×7 chat support and call support for early resolution of your problems.
Bluehost and WPEngine provide the best in class 24×7 customer support to their customers by Chat, Telephonic, and Ticket.
4. Control Panel
If you have uploaded your website then there should be ease of controlling your website via the control panel. A graphical user interface will help you to maintain the website in a better way.
It is recommended to choose the cPanel as the control panel for the website. cPanel has easy to use interface and even a new user can understand it better.
All web host may not use cPanel and have their own control panel. But whatever may be the case it is always recommended to install WordPress from web hosting control panel.
5. FTP and SFTP Support
The hosting provider should support FTP and SFTP for ease of uploading and downloading data from the server. Most of the providers have their inbuilt uploading and downloading widget, but the inbuilt widget is only recommended for small sized scripts.
You must also check the total number of FTP accounts offered by your web hosting provider.
6. Disk Space
You must have come across many hosting providers offering unlimited disk space in shared hosting packages. The question is do they really provide you with the unlimited disk space the answer is NO.
As per the terms and condition you can not host a file hosting website script or a video or music hosting script on shared hosting.
Every hosting server has limited space and which is divided into all the users hosting their websites on that particular server.
The next question why the hosting provider claims to unlimited space? The answer is shared hosting services are generally used to host a small script which d not required much uploading or downloading of data like file hosting scripts.
For example, a WordPress website with almost 400 posts will consume about 100 Mb of space if configured properly.
- Step by step guide to set up your first WordPress blog
- Power Up Your Website With 27 Most Essential & Free and paid WordPress Plugins
So the unlimited disk space is actually not unlimited and you might get additional charges or disk utilization warning from your hosting providers.
7. Bandwidth
The term bandwidth refers to the amount of data utilized in uploading+downloading when a user request to open a particular web page or to download or upload a particular file.
Most of the providers offering unlimited bandwidth with the shared hosting package. We have to understand that every service provider has to pay for the utilization of bandwidth and be rest assured they will not pay from their pockets.
So if you are thinking that you actually got the unlimited bandwidth with the package then it is a myth. You might be charged or lend up in account suspension or termination for utilizing more bandwidth.
8. FTP, PHP, Perl, SSI, .htaccess, SSH, MySQL, Cron
If you are paying for a web hosting account, you really should make sure you have all of these.
Note that some commercial hosts do not allow you to install PHP or Perl scripts (“What is PHP and Perl?”) without their approval. This is not desirable since it means that you have to wait for them before you can implement a feature on your site.
The ability to create or modify “.htaccess” files is needed if you are to do things like customize your error pages (pages that display when, say, a user requests for a non-existent page on your site) or to protect your site in various ways (such as to prevent bandwidth theft and hotlinking, password-protect a directory (folder), etc).
SSH access is useful for certain things, including testing certain scripts (programs), maintaining databases, etc. MySQL (“What is MySQL?”) is needed if you want to run a blog or a content management system.
Corn is a type of program scheduler that lets you run programs at certain times of the day (eg, once a day). Check to see if these facilities are provided.
9. SSL (secure server)
If you are planning on selling any goods or services through your website, you may want to see if the web host lets you set up SSL (a secure server).
You may have seen this on other websites where their web address begins with an “https://” instead of “HTTP://”. Setting this up will normally involve additional charges or a higher priced package.
At this point, the main thing is to do is to check if they are available at all before you commit to the host. You will definitely need to have SSL if you plan to collect credit card payments yourself.
If you’re relying on a payment gateway instead, and are not otherwise collecting sensitive or private information from your customers, it’s possible that you don’t need this facility.
For those who are wondering about what this is, but are too lazy to click through the link in the previous sentence, a payment gateway is just a third party company, like PayPal, that collects credit card payments on your behalf.
10. Email, Autoresponders, POP3, Mail Forwarding
If you have your own site, you will probably want to have email addresses on your own domain, like sales@yourdomain.com, etc.
Does the host allow you to set up whatever email addresses you want on your domain so that mail can be forwarded to your current email address, or placed into a mailbox on your web hosting account itself?
Can you set an email address to automatically reply to the sender with a preset message (called an autoresponder)? Can you retrieve your mail with your email software?
11. Multiple Domain Hosting and Subdomains
For those who are thinking of selling web space or having multiple domains or subdomains hosted in your account, you should look to see if they provide this, and the amount that they charge for it (and whether it is a one-time or monthly charge, etc).
12. Web Server and Operating System
Is the type of operating system and server important? I have discussed this issue at length in the article “Should You Choose a Linux or a Windows Web Hosting Package? Is There Such a Thing as a Mac Web Host?”
In general, most people will want to sign up for a web host offering a Unix-based system (like Linux, FreeBSD or OpenBSD) and running the Apache web server.
The most web-based software assumes your website is running on such a system, and you will usually experience fewer compatibility issues with it.
There are also a lot of guides available on the Internet on configuring such systems, so finding help when you need it is easier as well.
In my opinion, the only time when you will want to use a Windows server is if you’re running Windows-specific programs, like ASP scripts. But even then, you’ll probably be better off looking for a PHP-equivalent and using a Unix-based system.
From the above article, it must be clear as to what all things need to look while selecting a commercial web hosting.
If you have still any doubt in your mind then please feel free to contact me via mail or you can post a comment on this post.
Web Hosting Providers With All The Factors
We have seen the factors required to choose the best web hosting for your blog. To make to the job simpler we have selected few web hosting provider which are fulfilling all the factors mentioned above.
If you want to go ahead with your blog and want to get it live without any problem then we will recommend you to choose any one of the web hosting providers mentioned below.
- Bluehost (exclusive Discount + Free Domain name)
- WpEngine (Best WordPress hosting)
- iPage Hosting (Cheap Web Hosting)
- A2Hosting (Fast WordPress Hosting)
- Hostinger (Best Web Hosting – Bloggersutra is hosted on hostinger)
Wrapping Up
We have seen the most important factors that should be considered while selecting a web hosting provider for your blog. It is a time-consuming process to check all the factors with a particular web host.
In some cases, you have to chat with the hosting sales team to know the features. Well, to make it easy we have mentioned the list of best web hosting providers that are offering all the factors mentioned above.
The web hosting is among the best hosting providers and best suited for beginner and intermediate level bloggers. However, you can even go with the higher plans from the same hosting provider if your website is getting huge traffic.
If you have some other factor that you feel is important for selecting a web hosting provider then do share it with our readers by commenting on this article.
We might list the same factor into the list for our readers. If you want to recommend any other hosting company offering all the factors then do let us know.
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1 thought on “12 Factors to Consider When Choosing a Web Hosting Company For Your Blog”
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