Guide to pick the best hosting provider for your website

Website – the face of any project, marking its presence on the Internet, whether it’s a hobby club, a small private company, or a huge business with hundreds of employees. And the performance of the website is directly dependent on how reliable the hosting provider is behind it and how the quality of services he provides. Since it depends on the server hosting speed of access to a website, its performance and the smooth operation of its functionality.

Therefore, you have to choose the hosting carefully, based on the study of many factors and based on what specific providers offer. Since not all of them have the same set of features and resources. Moreover, some providers offer certain services that competitors do not have and that can be very useful both at the current stage of website development and in the future, when there is a need to expand functionality.

Basics of web hosting choosing

First of all, when choosing a provider for your website, you need to understand exactly what your website needs now and what it might need in the future. This is what you will need to base your choice on. And to solve this issue requires the most careful approach – if something will be missing, then not every hosting will be able to quickly eliminate this deficiency for one reason or another.

Server types

At its core, each hosting has a set of virtual and physical servers, which offers to rent for a fee. Depending on the type of server you have to pay more or less, and you get respectively more or fewer resources for your website, as well as certain advantages and disadvantages.

  • Virtual shared server: The simplest and cheapest type of virtual server, which implies the neighborhood with other websites on the same physical server and sharing a common pool of resources among all. In this case, in case of performance or security problems, all websites based on one physical server will be at risk at once.
  • Virtual private/dedicated server (VPS/VDS): A more complex and more expensive type of virtual server, which also implies a neighborhood of other websites. But instead of sharing a pool of resources, each site has its own limited resource. Accordingly, if neighboring websites have problems, your own website will not suffer. But there will be a limit to how much you can increase the consumption of resources of a particular server.
  • Managed Server: Managed VPS short for “Virtual Private Server,” is a premium web hosting solution that offers the perfect blend of performance, control, and convenience. In this setup, a physical server is divided into multiple virtual servers, each running its dedicated operating system and resources. What makes managed VPS hosting stand out is the comprehensive support and management provided by the hosting provider. They handle tasks like server maintenance, security, updates, and technical support, allowing users to focus on their websites or applications without the complexities of server management.
  • Physical dedicated server: As the name suggests, it is a full-fledged physical server rental from the provider, independent of other websites on the same hosting. In this case, in addition to better stability, performance and security, the user receives a greater degree of control over the server itself. Right up to the need to monitor the state of the server by its own means. For example, you should constantly check website availability on host-tracker.com/en as well as its server vital metrics.

Different types of servers are better suited for different tasks. Accordingly, if you choose one or another type, you will get different functionality and performance, as well as different opportunities to further increase the resource consumption of the website. What must be taken into account, because in the future, the inability to get more CPU capacity, RAM or storage can be a fatal drawback and a reason to migrate to another server.

Guaranteed uptime

It is hard to imagine a hosting provider who does not boast about “the highest stability of their servers compared to competitors” or “close to 100% uptime. Many, however, are trying to strictly follow these statements, but they do not always correspond to reality. All such statements should be independently verified. And in such cases, the most reliable providers often offer the opportunity to test all the features of the servers for free.

If you have found a hosting service, you should make sure to find out all the possibilities for future migration, if you suddenly find yourself for one reason or another not satisfied with the server. And so that you could then be able to support your decision with diagnostics, you will have to constantly use server status checker – host-tracker.com/en/ic/check-http throughout the trial period. And you will also need to keep an eye on other server metrics, not just the overall available functionality or the state of the website without taking server status into account.

Backups and security

A high uptime rate and a suitable server to grow on is a good things. But without the means to protect against cyberattacks, DDoS, hardware problems and even accidents, all this is simply useless. So when choosing a provider, you need to look at what is offered specifically in this area. Starting with anti-viruses and DDoS protection and ending with the ability to make regular backups.

The latter is worth noting separately – if possible, you should choose a hosting, which has in its arsenal such a thing as a backup plan. In simple terms, this is to enable you to quickly raise the server and website from the backup server, if the main irrevocably broke down or is scheduled for long-term maintenance. This service is not provided by all providers, so if it is in a specific service plan or it can be connected separately, then you should pay attention to such hosting. This will be a very useful feature to ensure the smooth and uninterrupted operation of the website.

Customer support

Very many people do not pay attention to how useful the quality of customer support can be in hosting. And this is true – if the provider provides an opportunity at any time of the day to contact the technical support with this or that question, and support staff can answer as quickly and in detail, then even a novice can cope with many difficulties.

But if there is no such support, or it has low efficiency, then even a professional can not cope with various small things. Especially when it comes to virtual servers with limited control from the user. For example, even if a webmaster uses monitoring tools such as website ping tracker – host tracker, there is still nothing he can do about an unexpectedly disabled instance without going through support. Which automatically means increased website downtime and decreased uptime. And this, in turn, leads to reputational and financial losses.

Pricing

Workability, functionality, performance, backups, support – all this is useless to assess if your budget can not withstand the monthly payment for the lease of the server on the hosting. Accordingly, even if you have found a perfectly suitable option, it is better to evaluate the pros and cons of the provider’s pricing policy first. 

And then it is worth looking for alternatives of equal quality – with a huge likelihood they exist, but you just did not pay attention to them. And you should always take into account and remember that more is not better, and cheaper is not worse.