Aplus.net Blog

Mitch over at the Web Hosting Show has a great post on things to consider when making the decision to go with shared hosting. Once you’ve decided to go with shared hosting for building your online business, you then need to select a company to host your site.

There are literally thousands of companies out there competing for your web hosting business. The good news? This has meant a decrease in prices over recent years. The bad news? It’s made it very difficult to know just what provider is right for you.

So to help you make the right choice, here are 4 important factors to choosing a web hosting provider:

1. Basic features. A trustworthy web hosting provider will be upfront about the details of its services. Storage, bandwidth, transfer, databases, webmail capacity, and the number of included domain names and email addresses are all basic features. Info on these should be very easy to find. If it isn’t, something’s probably not right.

2. Add-on features. The company should also be very specific about what kind of add-ons are available, and how much they cost. Can you get eCommerce options like website statistics, or the ability to add a shopping cart? Is SSL certification included? Or will you have to shift plans to get these features? And how much do they cost?

3. User-based features. These are the features that enable you to get the most out of what you’re paying for. What kind of control panel will your hosting plan have? Is it proprietary or provided by a third party? Is it configured for user-friendliness; or is it difficult to understand? You’ll also want to see the plan’s compatibility with POP3 (email protocol necessary to retrieve data from a separate server) and FTP accounts (separate space used to store files and images used by your site), as well as its policy on backups.

4. Uptime and Reliability. It is important to find out if the hosting provider offers an uptime guarantee. What is their uptime? What do they guarantee? How are you compensated if they falter? A reliable company should offer 99.9% uptime.

By comparing several companies, you’ll see who offers the best configuration of each of the above features at the best price. However, deciding just which of these are most important to the kind of website you plan on building is a different topic altogether. If you’re not sure of these needs, it’s best to partner with a “complete Internet solutions” provider who can guide you through this process. Let me know if you think I missed anything on the list.