Important Elements You Miss When Searching for A Reliable Hosting Provider

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What should you consider when choosing your Hosting Provider?

This issue is faced by each website developer because there are tones of hosting providers from which to choose, but, they’re not all trustable andworty when it comes to the important aspects of hosting like bandwidth or price plan.

What should you know

In addition to other factors, it is really important to choose a quality hosting as it affects the efficiency, performance, and protection of your website on the long run.

You do want a stable online business, your website is backed by the host,so it is preferred to pick a good host to move forward.

Let’s make a comprehensive analysis of a service provider and the perks available before deciding on the right web host for your website.

So let’s dive in.

What types of hosting are available?

You should take into consideration that every provider of managed and unmanaged hosting services have specific for hosting various types of sites. I will explain each in a sec.

In general there are different types of hosting options available such as Free, Shared, VPS and Dedicated hosting.

There are certain and really decisive aspects that you need to learn before you purchase a service provider especially as a beginner.

Ahead of your investment, make sure you take a closer look at these vital aspects:

Actually “Unlimited” has limits

If you’re about to build a small blog or a basic website that won’t be a big problem in hosting terms of so-called “unlimited space, bandwidth, storage, etc.”.

But if you’re planning to build an established business, loading content that might exceed the hosting company’s available limits, or include any illegal, immoral content, violating terms of service and policies you are going to be asked to upgrade your plan otherwise they might shut down your sites without any prior notice.

Make sure you know what you’re after when you’re shopping for a free/low-cost hosting service without misinterpreting the term”unlimited”.

Wish I knew this too before starting my site… 🙄

The Starting Price is different form the Renewal Price

Countless web hosting companies are willing to offer low prices and huge discounts included in the initial price to acquire as many customers as possible.

The catch is most of these are just sign up deals. The starting price seems great and nex year you wake up to a different billing amount.Why?The initial price was just a deal.

While the offer feels tempting, make sure you read their pricing policy information, many companies escalate their renewal prices two, three or even four times the introductory price.

If that happens, migrating(transferring your site(s)) with a different host, added fees, might cost you as well. A backup of your site before you make any changes is recommended as well.

Moving your sites over with a different Host (Migrating)

While you can find site migration for free, some web hosts may charge for this service.

Allowing you to bring your existing website(s) to a new Web Hosting Service for a fee.

Even if this process is most of the time automated, freeing up your time hassling about the complicated details and compatibility with the new host, keep in mind that not everything may be transferred, and you may discover that maintaining your sites seems harder with your new host.

We’ve prepaird an article for that. Read this step-by-step guide on How to move your Godaddy website to Bluehost’s Hosting

Moving on…

Page Builders might shape your site but not if you leave your current hosting provider

Most Services, Hosts provide some sort of drag-and-drop website builder that makes designing your website easy.

By dragging and dropping various elements to build your site, which is awesome considering you don’t need to learn to code to create a beautiful site.

The downside of this is not only they might slow down your site when you insert effects, videos or images, but they often lock you into the service, meaning the page builder is a propriety of the service, an HTML version cannot be created to be portable for you to transfer to a new service if you wish to do so.

BlueHost for example offers free migration for WordPress sites as well as 1-click installs for blogs,e-commerce websites and more.

You can transfer up to five websites and 20 email accounts, including all associated files and databases, from one of your old hosting accounts with BlueHost.

Another aspect you want to look at is customer service.

Support is very important for any online business.You want to have a 24/7 base you can count on, if your site goes down or an error occurs you want to be able to reach your hosting support.

From my personal experince, BlueHost, HostGator and other hosting companies I have reviewed on this site,offer excellent customer service.

Moreover if you have something to difficult to accomplish, their support is more than happy to do it for you.

Let’s continue with our subject

About the trustworthiness of servers, up-time rankings, and protection

Poor servers and unpredictable connections to the network could often take your site offline. That not only denies you an e-commerce store’s or blog viewer numbers raise, but a decrease in sales and also leads to low rankings on search engines such as Google and Yahoo.

Search engines will lose their trust in your seriousness towards your online business, if your website is down for too long.

Therefore, betting on a hosting company with reliable uptime ratings, ideally more than 99.5 %, uptime is vital to the success of your site.

Skip companies reporting an overall performance of scalability under 99 %.It is not worth the time for an online business in the long run.

Besides ensuring that your website and data are always available online, it is also important to ensure that the host’s bandwidth-this one is important-because the “unlimited bandwidth” it’s not actually that unlimited, as you add more content you will find that your website(s) will be affected in terms of speed, which is bad for user’s experience, sales and ultimately your potential buyers,that’s why you need to read their terms of service and policies,they have to mention the actual bandwidth limits that come with a plan.

Next, let me uncover the risks regarding free hosting.

Should you avoid Free Hosting when starting a blog or a website?

There is actually no company that can provide free services. You need to compromise with the average efficiency of your website once you have decided to go for their free services.

Usually free domains give you the chance to create a new domain name,meaning you register using the host’s domain,therefore your site will look something like this yourname.thefreehostname.com.

These domains are not too easy to rank.Unless you have a plan to expand and as you grow,consider upgrading or migrating your website(s) to a different reliable host, so you can purchase a domain name adding your company details only. A www.mydomain.com has more potential to rank than a free www.mydomain.freehost.com.

You may have to confront numerous other challenges such as visitors to your blog, your blog style, have to cope with your blog’s sponsored ads from your free host. All these aspects are risky when you sign up with a free webhost

So if your blog on WordPress’s platform is important for you then free hosting is a major ‘ NO. ‘

Make sure you have a host support at any time

If you have any problems with your website, it should always be resolved immediately. Free hosting plans may not be able to provide you with an active support team at times.

Check for web hosting companies that can provide service for customers 24×7.

You should rely on trustworthy web hosting providers which can offer you support with your hosting queries.

You can also be confident that anytime there is someone who can take care of potential errors you encounter.

Since online businesses have developed into a fast-growing popular trend and it is recommended that you start a site with a custom domain & a domain name provider(hosting companies may offer a free domain name with their plans)in their attempt to chain you to their company. But you can always purchase your domain name from elsewhere like NamHost or NameSilo, and change the DNS servers.

How successful and fast is the hosting company in resolving technical issues?

Seek for affordable webhost that provides 24/7 live support for their customers (yes, I said that before, but this is serious unless you don’t mind recreating your site over and over…).

Search for hosting plans that give support with live chat, as well as a team of experts to do hard,complicated tasks on your behalf.

Let’s say you want to open a pre-made online store with everything you need ready-made for you.

You can start selling using one of the most popular e-commerce patforms today.

3D Cart is undoubtedly the leader in advanced features, making the right choice to build an online store (and at no extra cost)!

Plus they offer 24/7 free tech support.

Thrive, grow and give priority to your business with an in-house customer support department.

Don’t go running after outsourced customer support, 3DCart‘s support have a better understanding of their business operation.

Whereas you may find this a practical idea to start free, but it’s time-limited, gradually as your online presence expands you will need space,storage for images,videos and other heavy contents then you may be interested in purchasing your own web hosting and domain. Note that as the domain name ages,you to get more positive results.

Look for an online secured hosting

You would certainly prefer to go with a paid version and there are several solid hosting providers on the market.

Free hosts capacity to secure your content is too low. You’re site(s) and even their servers can be hacked,if that happens, your site will not work,your content won’t be seen, and it can be questionable if you retrieve your work back.

Therefore security is vital, I will clarify about the backups subject further down.

But feel free to check out our affordable hosting providers with enhaced security, in-house back-ups from your host and 24×7 support.

If you’d like your hosting provider, to never put you in a difficult position you can go for a paid managed plan to host your website(s).

There are enough options available and you can select from, set your goals,research feedback about the brand,see what their offering,read their TOS and policies and even discuss with their support prior purchasing a plan.

You can start with affordable web hosting plans and gradually upgrade.

Doing so will enable your online business to expand over time without,you won’t be afraid of offline crashes and errors from a free host that you won’t know how to deal with.

Have a host that handles traffic

Another issue free sites encounter is traffic. You may consider upgrading your hosting plan here to support the traffic to your site.

Many free hosts can’t handle certain amount of visitors therefore your website’s visibility won’t stay online for too long.

One of the most important components an online business has is their audience. You want people to find&visit your sites anytime.

You want your visitors to make successful purchases with ease. This is our next must-have subject after security.

Next on my list of importance on hosting is the SSL certificate

Free web hosts do not offer SSL Certificates.

An SSL Certificate is recommended by search engines for security reasons. They’re warning visitors if a website is missing have such certificate.

The padlock figure on the search bar of every website, ensures the user that the site is safe to make purchases, this is a virus-free site and other important transactions, i.e. encrypts the communication between you and your website’s visitors so no-one else can snoop or steal information.

It also verifies the owner of the website’s identity to make sure it’s legitimate.

Some hosting companies offer SSL certification free for all your sites with a plan i.e HostGator is one of them.

Make sure you do some research before jumping into a free web host

You want to look for reviews regarding the host you want to start with. You never know what you can find.

It’s surprising how many people bounce into a free plan, add content without having any information about the host, this is bad because you will find yourself in a difficult situation with no support or the site won’t be available online because of bandwidth space(too much content), etc.

Therefore you want to do a little research and if you want to get online something of a small value for you or play around and test your creativity than go for the free versions.Don’t work to hard in vain…

Next, don’t host all of your sites with a single host

If you’re planning to host multiple sites like me, you want to split them on to different hostings.

I know it is more convenient in terms of money and passwords but think of this, if the host crashes, all of your sites will become invisible. This is the worst thing especially if these sites provide you an income.

I learned my lesson: “don’t put all your eggs in one basket!”

I host my sites with different hosts, although I host multiple sites with HostGator and never had a crash issue. But for my different type of sites like e-commerce or blogs I use other hosts rather than risking everythig with one.

Which is what I recommend you do as well.

This way you will always know that at least some of your sites are always showing up in search engines.

I use top providers like HostGator,BlueHost, A2Hosting or GreenGeeks you can read my reviews for these as well.

The other hosting providers I offer a review for are also tested and approved,but as with every businesses you want to go with the plan that best meets your needs.

Next,I promised a Backup summary

I can’t stress this one enough.

A backup is your website saved inside a .zip format,you can even download your backups as zip files and store them in a safe place, whenever your online site breaks, you have it saved in good condition to re-load it.

I encountered so many people complaining because they lost all of their hard work and they didn’t have a backup in place.

Make sure you have a backup done at all times.One day,it may save you a lot of time, money and the hustle of starting all over.

Imagine losing all your data and being forced to search for your content from scratch. Then build the website the way it was.

Most free hosts don’t offer a regular backup, so you never know what and when it all goes wrong.

Content producers have found through trial and error that the blueprint for an effective successful website involves continuous posting, more niche related articles and a good search engine optimization (SEO).

But as culture and technology become more interconnected, the specifics of what attracts an audience to particular content i.e. site speed,ssl certificates or ease of use continue to evolve.

That’s why hosting providers like BlueHost’ s services strive to provide everything a website needs and much more.

In the digital publication, the current year may mark the beginning of a new era around adjustments in content trends and search engine algorithms.

It is expected that quality content, substantial information with a customizable format and interactive media elements would surpass the formats that influenced the 2010s, such as short articles and photo-based lists.

There is no risk your website might go down with top providers such as BlueHost, HostGator or A2Hosting,there’s a review for each one of these hosting services pointing out their pro and cons.

People and business owners have long been recommending these hosts services, for they continue adding new features and they’re customers trust & support them.

Bottom line

Depends on you whether you chose to go for a free or paid plan, make sure you check up with these important factors I pointed out because they will sustain your online growth and people’s trust for your services.

However let me know in the comments,have you used a free web host?

How was it for you?

Have you found a better free hosting?Which one is that?(I might make a review on that too!).

Here are some other articles you might want to read:

What to Look for When You Build Your Website For The First Time

The Power Of Hosting Amazon AWS Cloud Services Review

Updated A2 Hosting Review

My True HostGator Review

Thanks for reading!