What Makes Good Web Hosting?
1. Speed
Nothing is worse for your visitors than a slow loading site. It can cause people to simply leave before your page even loads, it can cause them to spend less time on the site than they otherwise would, and it looks downright unprofessional. Speed is therefore a critical factor in choosing good web hosting.
Slow web hosting can occur for various reasons. Most low cost hosting you’ll see these days is what is called “shared hosting”. This means that many users will share the same server. This is advantageous in that it has dramatically reduced the price of hosting, however, exposes you to some risk of lackluster speeds in case your web hosting company tries to “share” the server with too many customers. Good web hosting companies manage their hardware so that all of their customers have high speed connections, and enough server resources to run their websites.
2. Reliability
A website is only valuable if it can be accessed, it is good to no one if it is down. Therefore choosing a reliable web host is critical. There are far too many factors that can cause bad reliability to try and check for them when researching a web host. In reality, reliability is dependent on the maintenance of the hardware, the network engineering, the physical location and safety of the data centre, the power supply where the data centre is located, the quality of staff manning the equipment and more. It is therefore best to determine reliability based on user feedback over time. Good web hosting companies will have no shortage of happy customers.
3. Value for Money
I personally am of the opinion that it can often be cheaper in the long run to pay for a better service, rather than get a budget service that causes expensive problems, loss of business, and inconvenience. With this being said, good hosting should be competitively priced, and give their users enough storage, bandwidth. and databases to have unrestricted web properties.
I have found that excellent web hosting can be purchased for around $5 per month when buying 24 months upfront. Monthly plans typically cost around $7-$10 dollars. I wouldn’t settle for a host that charges any upfront fees, or offers less than 50 databases. Some companies even offer free domains for life.
