The Top 5 Factors When Choosing A Web Hosting Company

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Top 5 Factors When Choosing A Web Hosting Company

Table of Contents

So right now you’re pretty anxious to get hosting for your new website and get your website up on the internet. But you’re wondering which hosting is the best one to go with because frankly choosing the wrong hosting is a headache that you don’t want to have to worry about. That’s why I’m writing this series to show you what you need to consider when selecting the best website hosting service.

1. Ease Of Use

Though it’s gotten considerably easier to get a website up and live on the internet, it’s only easy, once you know what you’re doing. You’ve got to first get your website pointed toward the hosting servers. This isn’t hard, but again, until you do it once it can be challenging.

Then you’ve got to build your website, and if you’ve ever tried to build a website from scratch then you know how difficult that can be until you learn the platform. If you haven’t, then you will want to allocate a good amount of time to learning the back office of a website where the website is managed by the website owner.

WordPress Back Office

If you are not a website builder or web designer, there are website building tools in various hosting packages that you can choose from. These builders, which do not require coding, will save you a lot of frustration and a tremendous amount of time.

Managing Website Files – The File Manager

Hosting a website involves uploading files (the pages of your website) to the server where your hosting is being done.

This can be either highly difficult or very easy, depending usually on the type of control panel that you use. You want the publishing of files on your website to be as easy as humanly possible.

Which Brings Me to the Control Panel

You can’t really talk about “ease of use” when it comes to hosting without talking about the control panel.

In my opinion, the easiest control panel to use in the hosting industry is cPanel. One of the best things that you’ll do for yourself in your hunt for the best hosting service is to find one that offers cPanel.

This is because it will make your life immensely easier when it comes to hosting your website.

The Hosting Company’s cPanel Gives You Control Over Your Website:

Uploading files
Checking your webmail
Adding scripts for things like blogs, discussion forums, wiki pages, etc
Checking website analytics
Redirecting files
Setting up add-on domains and subdomains
Etc.

Ease of Use Is Very Important

Don’t discount how important ease of use will be to your website hosting selection. You don’t want to have to struggle through this – you want it to be a positive experience. It should be a very positive experience and making sure that you select the right hosting service is the key to that. If you now understand how important ease of use truly is to select the best website hosting service, you are miles ahead of your competition. Unfortunately, these technical issues which are not all that hard are what turn off potentially successful online businesses before they ever get started.

2. Customer Support

Murphy’s Law asserts that if anything can go wrong, it will go wrong. That’s pretty much the case when it comes to doing just about anything online… especially getting a website out and onto the internet.

That’s why it’s vitally important that you have a team of people that are ready and willing to help you when that does happen, and you need help setting up your hosting.

Of course, you probably don’t have a team of people sitting there with you at home, watching your back, ready to jump in as soon as you need them.

Although that would be wonderful, it’s just really not feasible, so you’ll need a team at the hosting service… which is also known as “customer support.”

Yes, you will definitely find that having a strong customer support team to help you out in a crunch is extremely helpful. Even more so, you’ll find that having a strong customer support team that’s there for you twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and three hundred sixty-five days a year is even better.

Especially when working on a website for most people usually happens after hours, sometimes even in the middle of the night!

Customer service is actually the most critical of the top 5 factors when choosing a web hosting company, assuming the hosting company has the technical resources you need.

Multiple Ways of Contact Is Even Better

While having 24-hour customer service is important, being able to get in touch with that customer service in multiple ways is even better. What do I mean by multiple ways?

Phone: Well, first off there’s the old reliable telephone that we’ve all grown to depend on in life. Being able to speak to a representative on the telephone is something that seems to comfort us all. So having reps answer the phones is vital, and the faster they answer the better of course.

Online Chat: Next would be online chat capability. These days, it takes a lot for me to go with an online service such as website hosting that doesn’t have online chat support. It’s simply just so much easier to deal with, much faster, and less threatening. It’s much easier to ask what seems like a dumb question on chat than it is on the telephone, isn’t it? I think so!

Email: The last resort in my opinion is email. Email next to online chat these days is like snail mail. There’s just no comparison. When you’re having trouble, you want the answer fast, because very often getting stuck means that you can’t move on until you’ve solved the pressing and current problem. This means waiting for an email to arrive explaining what to do next can seem like a lifetime, and if there’s income or customers on the line… then it could mean disaster in your life. However, there are times when the answer isn’t pressing and it can wait, and that’s when the email is perfect. Either way, you want it to be there because it’s a great way to get help for simple problems. So there you have it. When selecting a website hosting service, customer support is paramount. Alright, if you understand how important customer service is, and you’re ready to get to part three in this series, then simply click here now!

3. Reliability

Nothing matters more to having a website online than… well… having your website online. This is precisely why reliability is so excruciatingly important. Because not having your site online when someone comes to visit, and possibly buy your product, join your news feed, read your articles, spread your articles, etc. can be a huge opportunity lost.

Let’s say that your site is online, and you’ve managed to get a page-one ranking on Google for an important and highly searched term within your market/niche. Now let’s hypothetically say that someone very important decides to search for your niche key term, and tries to click on your website.

Well, if you don’t have a reliable hosting service, then there’s a chance that your website might not be available when this person or business clicks on your link in the Google search results. This search may have been looking to find “the next big thing” in the search niche, and perhaps republish an article from some newcomer.

Or maybe she was looking to order 1000 of the widgets that you sell for a hundred dollars each, and give them to other influential people at her gala event she’s planning. Sounds far-fetched, but these things happen online every day, and if your website isn’t up and running when your time has come, then you’ve perhaps greatly missed out.

The fact is that you want your site to be up and running constantly. Maybe there isn’t one influential person or one big buyer, but maybe you get thousands of small change buyers each and every day, buying a $1 trinket here and a $2 trinket there. If your site is down for a day you could end up losing close to a thousand dollars. Another thing to realize is that online, people have VERY short attention spans and even shorter memories.

Once they see that your site is not up and running, they’re not going to bother to come back… they’re going to leave and go to the next site in the search results. If there’s more than a 2-second delay in your website popping up, they’re off and running to the next site.

That’s just how the internet works, so you’ve got to be ready. This means that you have to have your site up and running at all times, and you must choose a hosting service that allows you to feel comfortable with that. You do this by choosing the right hosting service in the first place.

Most of the better website hosts have a 99.9% uptime guarantee, which is pretty standard. That doesn’t leave much room for error. But you’ll also want to check around and read reviews as well, which will certainly tell you the truth about how good or bad the hosting service is, as far as reliability goes.

Just make sure that you select the hosting with a high reliability and uptime guarantee so that you have that peace of mind. You’ll have plenty of other things to worry about, you don’t need to worry about this too. Alright, if you understand how important uptime and reliability are when it comes to selecting the best website hosting service, and you’re ready to move on to the next part of the series, then click here now!

4. Web Analytics

One thing that people tend not to pay even close to enough attention to when it comes to their website is website analytics. In other words, knowing the numbers when it comes to traffic and visitors! Knowing this is crucial to staying ahead of your competition as well as simply being able to improve your website, get more visitors to your website, and if you’re earning an income from your website, make more money.

Website analytics are very important for you to be able to check (or actually watch) where people are coming from to get to your page. Knowing where your traffic is coming from allows you to be much more proactive in finding ways to increase that traffic.

For instance, you may get your traffic from writing articles and submitting them to article directories. Well if you write 100 articles, and you’re getting traffic from a number of those articles, how do you really know which articles are pulling in the most traffic? You don’t, until of course, you look into the analytics. You may think you know where your traffic comes from, but chances are that you don’t.

There’s a chance that a ton of your traffic is coming from a term that you never would have thought of. Once you learn this, and you actually tried to get traffic for that term, and write some SEO articles that will rank in the search engines, you’ll likely increase your traffic and sales. Sales are another area where knowing what’s working is hugely important. You can’t really know where your sales are coming from unless you keep track. Once you realize that sales are coming from a certain type of keyword or keywords, you can purposely write more content around those keywords. Makes sense right?

The Best Type of Web Analytics:

In my personal opinion, the best website analytics to come from hosting is AWStats which is in cPanel. These analytics give you the best in real-time analytics and you can check everything including:

Overall stats
Referring URL’s
Search terms
Daily visitors
Recent visitors
Etc.

You’ll be hard-pressed to find a better version of web analytics that comes with a service for free. You’ll also be hard-pressed to find a successful website owner who doesn’t review his stats often.

5. Resources

One of the good things about getting hosting these days is that there is a ton of competition out there. Now that can make things a little more difficult for you and me because it gives us a ton of choices. Too many choices aren’t great for people trying to decide on something as important as getting hosting for their beloved website.

However, the flip-side to that is that it means that those competing companies are upping the ante, and sweetening the pot for us customers. So now we get more of a reward for choosing them. This is a good thing of course, and so I wanted to go over some of the choices that you have now as far as resources that these companies are offering. Some of the things that will be offered for you to join a hosting service are pretty much standard these days, when once they were actually either not available, or extra.

The best term for this is “The Unlimited List” and includes the following:

Unlimited sub and add-on domains (meaning you can host multiple domains on one account)…
Unlimited bandwidth…
Unlimited disk space…
Unlimited data transfer…
Unlimited email accounts and email storage…
Etc.

So basically if you’re looking at a host that isn’t at least offering these resources, then you may want to look somewhere else entirely unless they offer something else that counterbalances the lack of these things. It is very important; however, to find out what they mean by “Unlimited” as this is somewhat deceptive when it comes to disc space and bandwidth. Read the TOS well.

Other things that you should be on the lookout for are things like:

A website builder…
Website templates…
Unlimited FTP accounts…
Software to easily add scripts for installing things like blogs (WordPress, Joomla, etc.), discussion forums, wiki pages, etc…
Website analytics…
SEO Tools…
Etc.

These are all things that you can likely get included with many of the best hosting services out there. For instance, HostGator, FatCow, or iPage are just a couple that offers those types of resources for you. For the most part, you’ll want to look also for web hosting services that offer cPanel as their control panel. A lot of these extras come standard with cPanel, and of course as said in one of the earlier articles, cPanel is by far the best and easiest to use control panel out on the market. So there you go… Resources are aplenty these days, and the more resources you have the better chance you have of creating and maintaining a more powerful website.

*** As long as you have a hosting company with … Ease of Use…Customer Support…Reliability…Web Analytics…and RESOURCES, then you should be fine with your decision, and know that you’ve chosen the best website hosting service.

Remember, as well, that you can always change your hosting company so it is not as if there is no way out. Oftentimes, website owners will not really know what their hosting company is about until the first itemized bill arrives after the first month. So even if you have done your due diligence and researched the Top 5 Factors when choosing a web hosting company you still may have to shop around.