How To Choose A Good Web Hosting Package
How To Choose A Good Web Hosting Package
The quality of your website starts and ends with the quality of your Greensboro web hosting package. So it stands to reason that choosing a good web hosting plan is one of the most important and far-reaching decisions you’ll have to make for your website. With such a high number of web hosting companies out there, making a good choice can be difficult. Suffice it to say that a good web hosting company will help you solve your problems, while a bad hosting provider will create problems.
How to choose the best web Greensboro hosting package?
It can be boiled down to 10 factors, which we will detail below:
- Uptime. Your web hosting company of choice should have an uptime guarantee of 99.9%. The reason for that and not 100% is simply that no company can absolutely guarantee 100% uptime. 99.9% is plenty good, though. Stay away from any number lower than 99.5%.
- Space/Bandwidth. Although there are many companies that advertise unlimited space and bandwidth, you’ll quickly find out that it’s all marketing hoopla. You’ll have to either call or read the fine print on their website/literature to find out what the actual limits are. Odds are, you may never hit those limits, but it’s good to learn about them beforehand.
- Technical Support. As a customer, do you have access to 24/7 support? What’s the turnaround time once you submit a problem? A good web hosting provider should provide round-the-clock customer service, plus it should solve any hosting-related problem you have within 24 hours.
- Control Panel (CPanel). Simply put, always try to get a company that’s based on CPanel. It’s the best interface out there, plus there are tons of software built around it, so if in the future you need to automate things, you’re already way ahead.
- Amount of domains you can add. Should you want to build more than one site, you need to know how many domains you’re allowed to add to your account, and at what cost. This is more of an issue with shared hosting, though, but worth keeping in mind.
- The included domain. Some web hosting companies offer you a free domain name when you purchase their hosting package, but make sure that this domain belongs to you and that you can transfer it to another domain registrar if, for whatever reason, you’re not doing business with the web hosting provider anymore.
- Price and renewals. A little comparison-shopping never killed anyone. When choosing your web hosting company, make a note of the renewal price, since many companies lure new customers with dirt-cheap prices for the first year, only to saddle them with expensive renewals.
- Payment options and money back guarantee. In almost all cases, going for an annual payment plan will result in a cheaper rate than going month-to-month, so if your budget allows, you should look into it. Also, check the refund policy: standard practice is a 30-day money back guarantee. Make a mental note of whether or not your payments are on auto-renewal, as you’ll have to remember to manually cancel if you’re not using that provider anymore.
- Features. The names aren’t friendly, but Asp, Asp.net, Ms access, Ms SQL should come standard with Windows hosting support. As for Linux hosting support, you want to see PHP, MySQL, Perl, CGI, SSI, .htaccess, telnet, SSH, crontabs, as well as support for general features like FTP, email, data backup, SSL, etc.
- Reviews. This is not too hard: just do a search on any major search engine for “XXX company reviews” and read what others have to say.
Following those ten steps should help you get a very good web hosting deal.