How to Choose a Good Web Hosting

Choosing web hosting maybe is like choosing life partner. It’s because not easy to choose a good web hosting service which can fulfill our needs. If we make wrong decision than it will be hard to move to other provider since the process itself is very complicated. That’s why it’s important to know how to choose a good web hosting service and how can we anticipate if something wrong happened to the web server which host our websites. Below are important tips to choose web hosting service.

1. Make sure that your website content won’t violate the rule of the hosting company. Some hosting company doesn’t allow pornographic content or illegal content like warez, hacking tools, etc.

2. Choose hosting service which is the most suitable for your needs. If you’re projecting that the website will have massive traffic, and money is not a problem for you, than it will be better if you lease dedicated server with dedicated IP. With this option, the server itself will only serve one website (not shared among other websites), and that will improve performance of your website.
If you think that your website won’t get too much traffic at this moment, than you can consider using shared hosting (virtual hosting) option. Shared hosting is cheaper because many websites hosted on one server, so the cost will also shared among the website owner. The drawback of using this option is you have to sacrifice your website performance, especially if there is already too much websites in one server.

3. Free is not always good. Choosing free hosting may save you a few dollars. But if you really serious to build a professional website, using free hosting is not recommended. Usually, there is a lot of limitation for free hosting. Some of the limitation is like limitation on file size and maximum hourly bandwidth.
Based on what I read from browsing through some websites, I found a story about a webmaster who was cheated by website hosting provider. Yes.. she is using free hosting. After spending an uncountable hours building her website and also promoting her website, someday she was shocked that her website is stolen by the free hosting company. She loses control to her own website, and she can’t do anything to get her website back. All of the hard work is now vanished.
If after reading this story, you still eager to use free hosting, then the best advice I can give to you is choose the well known hosting company. For example: geocities.com or google pages.

4. Do some research before buying web hosting service. Do not believe what the company said about their services. You need to find a proof from other people. Search for testimonial from other people about their service. People tend to give credit for a good web hosting company. You can find review about the company by searching at discussion forums about webhosting, for example webhostingtalk.com and findmyhosting.com.
And one thing you need to know that it’s very hard to find hosting company which is totally perfect. But at least, you can find hosting company with just few complaints from its customer. Another thing you have to find out is about server downtime of that hosting company, and how good and how fast they respond when something wrong happened with their service.

5. Check for blacklisted IP. Some server is blacklisted because of some causes, majorly because spamming activity. If you’re using virtual hosting (which means one server can be used by multiple websites), there is a chance that the server is also used by some website for spamming purposes. This can cause the IP address of the server banned by the authority. And if this happen, please choose another server or another hosting company. Because if you use this server, all your email sent from your website will be automatically rejected (or marked as spam) by almost all mail server. It will be bad, especially if you have a huge number of newsletter subscribers.
You can check blacklisted IP at dnsstuff.com or at another site which provide the list. And to find out the IP of your webhosting company, you can sign up with trial option (if available). Then you can check the IP of your server by using tools at http://www.who.is . Just fill in your domain name and who.is will check the IP number of your server. If trial option is not available, you can search another website hosted in this hosting company, and use who.is to determine the IP number of the server.

6. Do not use the same company to host both your domain and your website. This is for preventive purpose only. The reason to do this is because if something bad happened with your hosting company, there is a chance your domain will also affected. Diversification is a good idea.

7. Check the type of backup service provided by hosting company. Are they do backup periodically. If they do, how many times? Daily, weekly, or monthly?
Some hosting companies provide backup functionality but the process itself is the responsibility of yours. They just provide the tools, and you have to do it by yourself.
To get more information, you can contact hosting company. And for your information, some hosting company will charge you some dollars if you fail to backup your own website and you want to get your data from their own archives. (This fee can be avoided if you made periodic backup for all your website data).

8. Do not hesitate to ask and ask and ask again. A good hosting company will be very patient to answer every question regarding their services. If they respond in bad way, you can take conclusion that their service is not as good as advertised. A good webhosting company will not show their anger or reluctant to answer your question.

9. Look at the fine prints. One shocked fact is that almost all shared web hosting company is very unfair about the policy of their service. You only have two options. Take it or leave it. It’s very common condition. And what you can do is to find hosting company which offers the best deals for you.
You can visit this lens: Cheap Webhosting Review to get recommendation about good hosting companies.