How to choose a good web hosting

Planning to build your own Website or blog? You have to choose a domain name as well as a stable web hosting. If you have no idea on how to choose a domain, have a look at my post:  How to select a domain
In this post, I will tell you how to choose a good web hosting.

1. Functions

Different sites programs need different hosting, so find out what functions your site program need, and choose a hosting support it. If your site has only some static pages, basically a common hosting can support it. But if your site requires more functions, you must confirm the hosting support it. For example, if you are going to build a blog by wordpress, the hosting must support PHP+MYSQL, because of the advantages of open source, it’s more stable and affordable to run php on Linux than run it on Windows, if you are going to build your site with those free open source programs, I suggest you choose a Linux hosting or a hosting support PHP, because most free open source programs are developed by PHP, at the same time, do not forget to choose a mysql 4.1 or higher database.

2. Web hosting space, monthly brandwidth and IIS connections

When choosing a web hosting, you will see most of them limit the number of IIS connections and monthly traffic.

What is the number of IIS connections and monthly brandwidth?

IIS Connection limits restrict the number of simultaneous client connections to your Web sites and your Web server. Limiting connections conserves memory and protects against malicious attacks designed to overload your Web server with thousands of client requests. For example: In 20 seconds, there are 50 visitors visit the site at the same time, and the IIS Connection limits is 100, then during this period of time, your site can only accept 100 browsers at the same time.

Monthly brandwidth refers to how much traffic your hosting allows per month. This traffic is based on your site’s content, assuming that one of your website page is 10K, there are 100 visitors to this page each day, then the dayly brandwidth of this page is 1M, if your hosting has a limit monthly brandwidth, such as 20M, then your site will be down 20 days later.

If you are not sure how much IIS connections and monthly brandwidth you need, don’t worry, there are many web hosting with no IIS connections limits and no monthly brandwidth limits.

3. Web space speed

This is extremely important. A site that is frequently down will lose a lot of visitors. If someone finds your site on the search engine, and he tries to access it but find that it is down, he’ll simply go down the list to find another site. Slow access is also very frustrating for visitors (and for you too, when you upload your site). How do you know if a host is reliable or fast? If you can’t get feedback from anyone, one way is to try it out yourself over a period of time, both during peak as well as non-peak hours. After all, it is free, so you can always experiment with it.

4. Security features of the web host

If you own a business website that sells products or services, you need to choose a website hosting company that has e-commerce features like Agora shopping carts. Usually web hosts provide shopping carts for free. As scripts today usually use SSIs for inclusion of data, you have to ensure that you choose the web host that supports or activates SSI for your domain.

5. Service

Does its technical support function 24 hours a day, 7 days a week (often abbreviated 24/7), all year around? Note that I will not accept a host which does not have staff working on weekends or public holidays. You will be surprised at how often things go wrong at the most inconvenient of times. Incidentally, just because a host advertises that it has 24/7 support does not necessarily mean that it really has that kind of support. Test them out by emailing at midnight and on Saturday nights, Sunday mornings, etc. Check out how long they take to respond. Besides speed of responses, check to see if they are technically competent. You wouldn’t want to sign up for a host that is run by a bunch of salesmen who only know how to sell and not fix problems.

6. Price

Evaluate the pricing and ensure that it fits your budget. Avoid cheap shady hosting companies, as you will most definitely get what you pay for. Saving a few dollars a month will more likely increase the changes of big down time and obviously big bucks! Business-grade managed hosting is more suited towards serious businesses who want to stay online. Don’t compare prices with cheap offshore shared hosting that are almost free, as the pain that you’ll eventually experience, will no doubt cost you big time.