You’ve decided that you need a website. Now what?
Well, one thing that you have to do is to decide what web hosting provider you’re going to use to host your website.
This does not have to be a hard decision to make, but you want to choose the right web hosting provider so that you do not have to waste your time and energy migrating your website to a different web hosting provider later.
In this article, first we will go over what web hosting is, and then go over what you should look for when choosing your web hosting provider.
What Is A Website?
Before knowing what a web host is, you need know what a website is.
A website is made up of different types of files, images, text files, sound files, etc.
Websites are stored on what are called servers. Servers are powerful computers where the files of websites are stored. Those servers connect to the internet so that other people can connect to the server and see and access those websites.
What Is A Web Host?
A web host, also called a web hosting provider or web hosting service, is the company that stores and maintains these servers.
A web hosting provider will own a large number of these servers, as well as maintain them and keep them secure.
What To Look For In A Web Hosting Provider
Now that you know what a website and a web host is, it’s time to go over what to look for in a web hosting provider.
Website Uptime
Uptime refers to the percentage of time that your website is available to visitors to your website. Any time that is not available to your website’s visitors is considered “down” time.
Situations like the ones above are not what you want, so obviously you want your web hosting provider to provide the most uptime possible for your website.
Uptime is so important that any good web hosting provider will boldly display their uptime percentage as a selling point.
You should choose a web hosting provider that guarantees at a least a 99% uptime with a money-back guarantee.
24/7 Customer Support
You will want the web hosting provider to provide 24/7 customer support in the form of either phone support or online chat support.
You want whatever problem that your website might have fixed as soon as possible, and sometimes you need to be able to contact your web hosting provider’s customer support for that.
Most people also need their web hosting provider’s customer support the first few times that they set up web hosting, as well as having the occasional question from time to time. Having 24/7 customer support makes it that much easier to set up a website and fix any issues that will come up.
Web Hosting Disk Space
As you know, websites are made up of different types of files, images, text files, sound files and more. All of these resources take up space and. need to be stored on a server. The space that they take up on servers is referred to as “disk space” and sometimes as “storage”.
You may see web hosting providers list something like “60 GB disk space”, “10 GB disk space”, or something similar as part of their features. This refers to the amount of disk space that they will provide on that particular hosting plan.
Different web hosting providers handle how they offer disk space differently.
For example, web hosting providers may differ in how much disk space they offer depending on each web hosting plan. Another example in how different web hosting providers handle disk space differently is that some include email storage as par of their web hosting plans, and some do not.
Some web hosting providers do not include email storage as part of the web hosting plans and charge extra for this.
Each website and its need for disk space is different and can change with time, so you will want to choose a web hosting provider that offers more than enough disk space for your needs. You also want them to offer different web hosting plans so that you do not have to migrate your website to a different web hosting provider later.
Web Hosting and "Unlimited Disk Space"
Some web hosting providers list that they offer “Unlimited Disk Space” as part of some of their web hosting plans.
You might ask, do these web hosting providers really offer “Unlimited Disk Space”? The answer is, it depends.
No web hosting provider really provides unlimited disk space. This would cost too much and web hosting providers would go out business if they really did this. You typically get what you pay for, and web hosting is no exception.
Let’s talk about new websites to explain this. New websites typically go with a shared hosting plan because of the price. Luckily, almost all new websites require relatively little resources, including disk space.
Shared hosting plans are typically the cheapest hosting plans. Websites that are on a shared hosting plan share resources on a server.
Web hosting providers offer “unlimited disk space” as a selling technique to attract more customers knowing that most of these websites require very little disk space. This allows web hosting providers to get away with saying that they offer unlimited disk space and get away with.
Web hosting providers will require website owners to upgrade their hosting plan when they begin to use up too much of the resources. Each web hosting providers will be each go about how they handle this differently.
Web Hosting Bandwidth
Bandwidth is the amount of data that can be transferred between your website, your website users and the server(s) that your website is hosted on.
Web hosting providers often list the amount of bandwidth that they offer expressed in Gigabytes(GB, Gigabytes per second) or Megabytes (MB Megabytes per second), for example, 1024 GB Disk Space and 60 GB Disk Space.
Every website is different and each one has different needs. For example, a new blog will have different bandwidth needs compared to an established ecommerce website. In fact, most new websites require very little bandwidth.
You can do a search to see what kind of bandwidth that you’re going to need. If you have a website that will probably require a lot of bandwidth, for example, a video sharing website, or a website where files are downloaded and/or uploaded to, then your website is probably going to use and need more bandwidth than just a plain blog.
The key is to not overthink this and go with a web hosting provider that will let you seamless upgrade your web hosting when you need to.
Web Hosting And "Unlimited Web Hosting"
Some web hosting providers offer “unlimited bandwidth”.
This is similar to providing “unlimited disk space”. Web hosting providers oversell the bandwidth that they offer to attract more customers. Similar to when they offer”unlimited disk space”, the bandwidth that they offer on their hosting plans is not really unlimited.
Also, similar to when web hosting providers offer “unlimited disk space”, they will require website owners to upgrade their hosting plan when they begin to use up too much bandwidth.
They Offer A Variety Of Plans
Most new websites can get away with being on a shared hosting plan. There are a lot of web hosting providers that provide this service, but you also want a web hosting provider that will provide the full range of web hosting plans so that you can grow your website without having to concern yourself too much with the hosting.
The owner of a new website will probably want their website to grow. This includes the amount of content that is on the website and the amount of traffic that the website gets. This will probably come with the amount of disk space and bandwidth that it requires, and much more.
Ideally, you will want to stay with the same web hosting provider so that there is no interruption in the availability of the website to your website’s visitors and so that you can focus on the business and running your website. Going with a web host that provides a variety of web hosting plans can allow you to do this.
Intuitive And Easy To Use Account Interface
Every web hosting provider provides you with a web hosting control panel. You will want that interface to be intuitive and easy for you to use so that you can concentrate on your business and not your website’s web hosting.
They Support Website Migration
Hopefully, you will choose the right web hosting provider for your website so that you can upgrade your web hosting plan when your website grows. Sometimes, however, website owners choose the wrong web host.
You will want to choose a web hosting provider that supports website migration just in case that you want to or need to move your website to a different web hosting provider.
Conclusion
Hopefully this article will help you choose right web hosting provider for your website.