I recently spent a while shopping around for different web hosting companies. I did a lot of research and have been through a fair few. I finally found a host and I thought I would share with you what I have learnt. The web hosting company I chose is Site5 – I have been hosting there for about a year now, and I couldn’t be happier. So here’s my criteria as to what makes a good host:
24/7 Support
Many hosts say they offer 24/7 support, and even if they do actually have 24/7 support staff, quite often there still isn’t enough staff available for you to actually receive true 24/7 support. I live in Australia, so when I’m awake, the US is asleep, so I really get to know whether support is really available 24/7 or not. The key to good web hosting is having good support – even if you only need their help once a month, you don’t want to be waiting half a day each time to hear back from your host, as a lot of time gets wasted. Choose a host who you can be sure offers 24/7 support, with response times under 15 minutes. The host I am currently with often averages around 7-10 minute response times, and usually I have a resolution in under half an hour. Considering I run a bunch of different sites and am always short of time, it really helps.
Decent Speeds and Uptime
You don’t want to be paying for hosting which never seems to work, and when it does, it crawls – that goes without saying. However its not always as easy as it sounds to find a host which meets these requirements. Between overloaded servers and bad upstream connectivity, speeds are usually quite slow and unstable on shared hosting. Once again, I really notice this being in Australia, so even if you are in the US, you need to think about if people outside the US are visiting your site – this is especially important if your site sells a product or has a lot of multimedia. For example, some hosts gave good speeds to my customers in the US but not to me or my customers here in Australia, which wasn’t good. What you want is a host who can deliver great speeds in the US, and above average speeds everywhere else . Once I found a host which provided this, my sales and web traffic sharply increased.
Moneyback Guarantee
This goes without saying but believe it or not, not all hosts offer it, and those that do, don’t always honor it. I don’t need to explain in detail how that you don’t want to see your hard earned money go to waste, and neither do I. Make sure you choose a host that offers a decent money back guarantee that lasts for at least 30 days.
Free Migration
If you already have a site hosted with another provider and you are wanting to change hosts, it can be incredibly hard moving a bunch of sites across if you don’t have a site who can do it for you. Before you sign up, make sure you check with your prospective new host that they can pull across your old sites. In my case I simply took a backup of my old sites and uploaded the backup to Site5′s server at which point their support staff restored the backups for me and I was up and running in no time.
Skinned cPanel
Most hosts offer cPanel, it’s nothing special. The interface for cPanel however is counterintuitive and really doesn’t work that well. If your host can offer a more intuative and easy to use skin for their cPanel interface then it can really help you get things done a lot faster, and means you aren’t going to have to send support a ticket everytime you can’t work out how to do something.
Well there you have it. My five criteria that a web hosting company must meet in order to get my sale. If you have any questions or comments of your own, feel free to add them in the comments box below. Happy Hosting!
