TechAtLast

We are in the 21st century, any business not on the web is really missing out. Many people, organizations and parastatals are waking up and bringing their business on the World Wide Web for global exposure.

Even if you created a Facebook or Twitter page for your business, you still need a web page which your prospective customers can visit to learn more about your product and services (Your virtual office).

Let’s say you already created and registered your business domain, you need a host that will carry your website load on its shoulders such as Hosting.co.uk. There are a number of them on the web promising a lot of benefits why you have to use them, giving you a big headache on which one to trust your web hosting unto.Hosting company

This guide is created to help you make the best of decision in choosing the web hosting company that perfectly suites your business.

Price

Most of the times, we like to choose from the cheapest out of the product and services, in choosing your web hosting company, it might turn out to be a disaster if you choose the cheapest. It is good to consider a low budget company, but you have to review first what they offer, before jumping at the offer. Non outsourced support and quality hardware are costly, you wouldn’t expect a web hosting company charging $1.99 per month to give you these features, HostMonk has a comprehensive list of hosting companies with their respective packages, and you can easily compare and make your choice.

Your area of specialization

You have to choose your web hosting company based on the area you want to specialize your business, different host are right for different customers. Some host offers good shared plans but lacks solutions that are great for growing businesses while others has strong enterprise solutions, but won’t be good for someone who just want to open a small recipe blog. You have to consider the company’s area of expertise before finally subscribing to them and choose the one that will understand your need. You can do an online research for testimonies and reviews to confirm how powerful there service has being.

Specifications and Limitations

A web hosting company offers services just like your computer; they have RAM, disk space, processing per etc. You have to specifically know what you want to do with your site. E.g., you will need a good hosting package for an ecommerce site, blog with rich content, videos. Other factors you have to consider is that; do they charge for additional domains, backups, supports etc. Make sure you interact well with them before taking your final decision, let them know what your site needs to be.

Technical support

This is one of the crucial points to consider when choosing a web hosting company. You have to critically review their support department, what are people saying about their customer support agents, are they competent enough to handle a technical difficulties you may encounter, are they around 24/7 or you have to wait for them to open office before you can solve you website’s down time issues. What are the mode of their contact; Live chat, toll free phone, Email support etc. Do they outsource support to contractors?

Features

At this point, you have to check out what the company offers that others don’t, what extra benefit can your site generate if you choose them as your host; Energy saving, multiple data centers, or other features such as free domain privacy or regular backups.

Customer testimonies/ Reviews/Reputation

Check forums, social media and blog reviews about the web hosting company. The kind of experience their past and present customers are having, what people are saying about them, ask questions on those places, about their support centre and other things, you will like get few response from sincere users.

User Interface/ Control Panel

Being a web master, there are few things you are expected to know how to do, installing wordpress, setting up FTP accounts, setting up emails without engaging the host. You have to know what kind of interface your web hosting company uses, is it cPanel or Plesk, or some cumbersome interface that no one can easily understand. You will have to work with this once a while, so you have to find out from the beginning.

Future Planning

You don’t expect your website or blog to remain a baby till death, there is always a room for growth, you will most likely have to upgrade your hosting plan as time goes when your traffic increases, it is important to check from the beginning if your web hosting company has a very good plan you can migrate into.

This will save you from the hassle of moving from one host to the other which consumes valuable time and effort.

It is very wise to certify these factors before finally deciding on which company should host you on the web space.

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10 Responses

  1. Hey Olukunle !
    I have purchased a new domain name for my website. But now i’m confused in hosting plans. I have planned to buy Shared Server.. Is it good.. Because one of my fellow suggested me that i have to purchase VPS Hosting.. should i go for it or not.. please help.. i’m confused right now 🙁

    1. Hey Jasmeet,

      Before considering whether to choose VPS hosting or Shared Hosting, may I ask you few questions?

      How many sites do you have?
      How many visitors on average do you get monthly on those sites (I mean average visitors or you can say pageviews which we can also refer to as hits)
      What’s the business’s scope (do you intend to serve a larger audience in coming weeks or your niche is limited to a certain group of people?)
      How prepared are you in terms of payment? I mean do you have enough financial abilities to purchase VPS server. To determine this, calculate how much you’re making from those sites and minus what you’re spending on the long run so as to know if you can take the hit.

      Remember, you cannot pay extra for hosting when the site is not bringing in good income…..so, work smart.

      If you can answer these questions, that would help in determining if you need VPS or shared.

      – Olawale Daniel

  2. nice tips,i would like to add more:
    up time should be 99.99%,because most of the companies unable to fulfill this time.
    Bandwidth,number of domains and sub domains,parked domains,email accounts….These should be also consider before choosing best web hosting company for your business brand.

  3. Hi Olukunle, great post. . Initially i made a mistake by choosing cheap web host but soon realised the importance of quality host. . Thanks for sharing . .

  4. Hi, This really valuable article for someone who care about to start their own online business. This is a great opinion.Thanks !

  5. Thanks Olukunle Moses, I agree with you it is really important to think many times to decide what Web Hosting to use, need to read other reviews and forums to get an idea, Web Hosting is really important even if you have Domain

  6. Well that was detailed and informative post but for hosting I always love go with hostagator .. they are just too good…

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