Hosting 
5 Comments The Importance of Choosing a Good Web Host
The decision of which company to use to host your website is often a point of confusion for many novice web masters. There are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of web hosting companies around the world, all trying to get you to pay your hard earned cash to them to host your website. Your website may be a hobby or a business website. You may want a website to host images to share with your family if you live in another country.
Whatever your website is about, choosing a good host is going to be important. Without a good host, you’re going to be throwing money away. Regardless of how busy you want your site to be, you will want to be able to access it on demand – any time of day or night. So what should you be looking for in a good web host? Who are good web hosts?To answer these questions, you really need to have in mind a clear idea of what you want on your website. Do you want to have a website with 5-10 pages of static text, with maybe an image or two? Maybe you want a website like this, but you want a message board to discuss various topics of interest to you and your readers? Or, you want a blog, managed by a content management system like WordPress? You may well even have ambition to have an online shop and need secure connections to manage payment processing.
Each of these websites are going to require different things from a web host. To keep things simple, from the start, all web hosts can cater for the most basic of websites – that is a few HTML pages with images and javascripts. More complex websites, such as those with message boards and content management systems will need databases to store information, and server side processing of scripts.
When choosing your host, you need to know what script languages you will be using. Will you be using PHP? ASP? Perl? Maybe Cold Fusion is your thing? Either way, this will immediately impact what hosts you can use. PHP is very common nowadays, and is always growing in popularity due to its ease of use, and it’s equally usable on Linux and Windows servers. Beyond this, if you need databases, will you be running MySQL? MSSQL? Oracle? As with the language, your choice of database significantly affects what hosts you can use.
If you’ve got this far, and managed to find a host that caters for your sites needs, then you ought to be aiming for a reputable company. There is no point in having a host which cannot guarantee you good up-time. That is, you want a host that has your site on virtually 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and each day of the year. Noone can guarantee 100% uptime, but those constantly receiving reviews mentioning good uptime are worth placing money on.
Without good uptime, your readers will not be able to access your content regularly. If this is the case, you will never retain their interest because constant time outs are a sure fire way to failure. I’ve visited a number of sites which I have tried refreshing and they are just too tempermental to come back to.
Obviously the key to a good host is to ensure that they are receiving good reviews, that they cater for your site’s needs in terms of script languages and databases. Anything else is a bonus. Most commonly, you will want to have some way of managing your domains, and setting up email accounts.
I know anyone reading this who has a host will recommend their host. I mean, if they are happy, why wouldn’t they? For me, my sites are hosted by 1 and 1 (this is an affiliate link). They offer a variety of hosting packages, depending upon your needs. There are also a number of perks with 1 and 1, because there are ready to install applications that you can use. I use a Business Pro account, so you will get a feel for how much this hobby of mine is costing. You can see some of the benefits of it too.
What web host do you use? What do you look for when choosing a web host?
Disclaimer – The link I have provided is an affiliate link, meaning should you decide to purchase a hosting package or otherwise from 1 and 1, 1 and 1 will pay me a small commission for recommending you as a customer. You will not be charged anything for this.
Using crappy web hosting companies can be bad, even if they offer the languages you want. If they are bad companies, they’ll probably be slow or often offline. The slower your website is, the more likely people will leave and make your bounce rate go for a ride.
The more often you’re website is offline, the more likely it is that people will tell others to stay away from your website, hurting your traffic and bounce rate.
Great post, Mark!
You’ve hit the nail on the head there Joe. You want to make your visitors experience as enjoyable as you can. If your site is slow, it doesn’t even matter how good your site looks, they’ll just close the browser
It is important to choose a good web hosting for our site. Some of the company cannot deliver what they have promise in their package and that is why we must choose carefully =)
Hi Mark,
I am a web designer and I work with a local web hosting company regularly and I always recommend them to my clients, but I have also dealt with many different hosting companies for different projects. The one thing that I tell clients who ask for recommendations on web hosts is: you really do get what you pay for more often than not when it comes to hosting. Sure, you can find hosting for $3 a month, but I would bet that their customer support is going to be a bit lacking and your website will be down more often than it should be, etc., etc. That has been my experience anyways. That said – you don’t need to buy more hosting than you need. I think you should look for a happy medium of a good, reputable company and also one that offers only what you need at a reasonable price. That’s just my two cents!
Hi Libby,
I agree loosely with getting what you pay for. I think if you’re paying very little each month, you will probably get a lack-lustre customer service. I’m using Host Gator at the minute, having switched from 1and1. I pay about $9 a month – though it would be cheaper if I bought bulk hosting over 3 years. The customer service is exceptional, and the hosting package is really easy to use. With 1and1, I was paying £55 per quarter ($75). Unfortunately the 1and1 control panel was custom coded to their company, and left the account manager little control, or at least less intuitive control – when compared against CPanel on Host Gator.
I would say that even though I’m paying nearly 3 times less for hosting now, I’m much happier with Host Gator.
I do recommend that people shop around however – it does pay off, especially if you have specific needs.