Our Overall Top 3 Best Web Hosting Picks
These days it’s common practice for businesses to have a website. Besides being a great way to build your brand it can also become an easy way for you to cut down on overhead and help you reach a whole new audience. That is unless you chose the wrong web host for your website, in that case all you really have to look forward to is an ongoing nightmare that will not only cost you money but lots of time, and everybody knows in business time is money.
Our hope is by the time you finish reading this article you’ll have a better idea of what to look for and what to look out for in a web hosting company before you allow them to host your website.
Price – find out what’s really included in the advertised price and what features cost extra.
Sure all those $1.99 a month web hosting plans sound fantastic, that is until you’re halfway through with the order form and you realize, what was just $1.99 a month is now $9.99 a month.
We’ve always tried to steer people away from choosing their hosting based primarily on price and the reason for this is because the discounted price you’re receiving initially, may not be the price your account will renew at. To make this easier to understand, just look at what their special sale price is, let’s just say $2.95 a month for a one-year contract paid in advance. After that one year is up your account will renew at their full price, which is normally somewhere in the neighborhood of $6.95 a month.
Don’t pay for extra features you don’t need just because they put them in front of you.
Let’s just take for example Ipage. Now we love iPage and we’re in the process right now of building a website on their servers… All right get ready for it, BUT they are notorious for all their upsells during the order process, heck even after the order process is finished and you’ve logged into your control panel you’ll have to click no thanks to another upsell before you ever get in your control panel area. For us this is no big deal, we understand they make their money by offering these additional services, but for someone just starting out it can be totally confusing.
Okay I’m going to let you in on a little secret about all those additional features that most web hosting companies don’t want you to know. You don’t need them, plain and simple. If you do need these additional features you’d be better off finding a web hosting company that offers them standard, sure you may pay more for this type of account initially, but in the long run you’ll end up saving big-time, especially after your account has been renewed.
Security – not just from hackers and viruses.
Of course it’s important to protect your website from hackers and viruses but it’s equally as important that the equipment your website is hosted on is secure from fires, floods and theft. I bring this up because I recently received an e-mail from someone who was hosting their website on their friends server which was located in the basement of their building, needless to say the server was stolen.
No matter what web hosting company you decide to go with it’s important you make sure they host their servers in a state of the art data center not just a basement at a friends house. Data centers always have security personnel on staff protecting the facility, there’s no chance somebody can walk away with your website.
Another advantage of hosting your website with a web hosting company that uses a data center is your website is constantly being monitored. The reason this is such a big deal is because things happen sometimes, servers just go down. Let’s say your website is hosted with a web hosting company that uses one of the main data centers located in the US. The second a problem occurs a technician is immediately notified there is a problem with the server that needs to be fixed. If you’re using a company that doesn’t host in a data center it could be days before the owner of the server actually knows there’s a problem.
Moral of the story… Choose a big name web hosting company, they wouldn’t imagine hosting their servers anywhere other than a data center.
Customer service – if your web hosting company doesn’t answer your questions why are you still with them.
Just like knowing what features you’ll need, you’ll also need to know what level of customer support you’ll need. Now this is where things get a little tricky, you see most people who sign up for web hosting tend to believe that if they run into a problem while designing their website that their web host should help them. You did not hire a design consultant, you rented space on a server to host your website, that’s all.
If you need extra handholding, there are web hosting companies out there that specialize in helping beginners, this doesn’t mean they’re going to design your website and answer every single question you have, but they will help to point you in the right direction along the way.
Instead of focusing so much on getting people to answer your questions try using their knowledge base to find the answer you’re looking for, this is usually the easiest and fastest way to find the information you’re looking for.
Put it all together and finding the right website hosting.
As you can see from the above article, choosing web hosting is a lot more personal than you would think. In order to find the best web hosting you’ll need to take the above mentioned factors into account along with your company’s specific hosting needs.
Please try and take advantage of our web hosting reviews and are best webhost lists as we go into great detail about individual web hosting companies pros and cons.
