10 Things to Know Before Buying a Web Hosting Plan

Shopping for a web hosting provider can turn out to be a complex task. With so many web hosting companies offering different hosting packages and features, one can get lost quickly. Choosing the right web host is important; while some companies offer a money guarantee, you could still end up being stuck with a web host that doesn’t satisfy your needs.

Here are a few aspects of web hosting you should know about before you sign up for a hosting plan :

1. Customer Support

Downtime means lost of profits, especially if you’re running an online business or making money from advertisement. In when it happens, you’ll want to be able to reach your web host quickly and your problem solved efficiently. A few things you want to check about your web host’s support are 24×7 phone support, 24×7 email support, live chat, a good knowledge base and a user forum.

Avoid web hosting companies who outsource their customer support to foreign countries. These call centers usually deliver poor technical support quality.

2. Performance and Reliability

Web hosting performance can greatly vary between providers. This can depend on a number of factors such as server hardware, operating system, installed softwares, the number of users hosted per server.

You may also want to make sure that your web host uses multiple levels of redundancy. In this case this means RAID storage, redundant power supplies, redundant network equipment, etc.

3. Disk Space

Make sure that the web hosting plan you want to buy offers enough storage space for all your files, images, videos and everything you wish to make available through your website.

While many web hosts offer unlimited disk space, it is important to know that there might some other constraints such as the maximum size allowed for a single file. You can usually find these informations in your provider’s TOS (Terms of Service).

4. Monthly Transfer Limit

Also erroneously referred to as “Bandwidth”, the transfer limit is the maximum of data that can be transferred to or from your website on a monthly basis. So if you’re planning to broadcast videos on your website, make sure that it won’t exceed your allowed transfer limit or you could have your website suspended or get an extra charge.

5. Scripting Languages

If you have a dynamically generated website, make sure that your web host supports the needed scripting languages. The most common ones are PHP, Perl, Ruby on Rails, ASP and ASP.NET.

If you’re unsure about this, you’ll need to ask the developer of your website.

6. Database Servers

In order to store and use dynamic data such for a forum, blog or ecommerce, you’ll need a database server. The most popular one has to be MySQL and it should be more than enough most of the time. But in some cases where a huge database is used and higher performance is needed, the MS SQL server from Microsoft comes to the rescue.

7. Control Panel

The control panel allows you to manage your web hosting account. From a web interface you can manage your databases, email accounts, subdomains and much more.

Some web hosts use their own custom control panel while others use commercial softwares such as cPanel and Plesk.

Personnally, I highly recommend cPanel web hosting as it is very easy to use and the fact it’s the most widely used control panel makes the process of transferring your website to another web host easily (assuming they’re both using cPanel of course).

8. Backups

It’s important to understand what backups are for as far as web hosting goes. Unlike what many people thinks, you cannot access any backup copies of your website. You can’t even request for your website to be restored like it was sometime ago most of the time.

So what are these backups for then?

Your web host makes backup copies of their entire servers in case of software or hardware failure. This allows them to restore all the websites and data on another server quickly to minimize downtime. Some web hosts perform backups once a week while others will backup everything every 24 hours.

To automate the backup of your website, you’ll need to schedule the execution of a backup script that will store the backup file to a remote backup server over FTP.

9. Scalability

As your website grows, it will constantly require more and more resources like CPU or memory. And if you’re consuming too much resources on a shared server, chances are you’ll get your account shut down without notice.

If this happens, it means that you’ll need to upgrade to a better performing type of hosting such as a Virtual Private Server (VPS) or a Dedicated Server.

10. Moneyback Guarantee

If your web host doesn’t meet your expectations, make sure they’ll refund your money. Most of the time, web hosting companies offer a 30 or 45-day moneyback guarantee. Don’t hesitate to switch to another web host quickly if you have any type of “discomfort” with your provider.

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