If you are about to finalize a web host to run your website or are fed up of lackluster services of a present one, then you need to look for these seven parameters before taking a decision.
State of the art infrastructure
Infrastructure is a foundation of any web hosting company and one must try to find out the number of years the company is in the business of web hosting to understand efficiency of its infrastructure. Similarly, the number of client-websites that are being looked after by the hosing providers can also throw some light on capacity of the infrastructure.
A robust infrastructure facilitates a hosting service provider to manage reliable backup schedules by designing appropriate backup policies. It also maintains a strong support of its connectivity to enable online presence of your critical business applications even during the peak hour demands. Usually, a right web hosting company has its servers placed in diverse and strategically chosen locations in top tiered data center migration.
A well-established hosting infrastructure can easily thwart attempts of spamming, Distributed Denial of Service or any other instances of intrusions. In addition to this there is a reliable monitoring of servers that is capable of instantly alerting the concerned personnel or client in the event of any issues. The infrastructure of right hosting companies is also immune to issues that could impact performance of other companies.
Rapid response to support request
There is hardly a hosting company that is slow in its response to sales enquiry. However, once a client has paid the hosting fees, majority of the hosting services start exhibiting their true colors in terms of slow and cold response to support requests.
Reliable hosting service providers are capable of identifying support enquiries that need urgent response at least in the form of an acknowledgement. Once the client is aware that the query is being attended to, then he is ready to wait for more time for resolution of query.
Since most of the established hosting services operate globally, it is better to verify, whether the provider is capable of providing 24x7x365 support guarantee.
Tech-ready hosting providers
It is a well-known fact that majority of hosting service providers would be capable of offering support of email accounts, MySQL, and PHP. These are sufficient resources for catering to basic needs of hosting.
If you are going to manage special applications, then you will have to seek additional features to help run the extensions as well as applications. Ideally, one should make sure that the provider has ability to support your hosting with appropriate versions of databases as well as languages. If the host has offered PHP 5.3 based server, then an application with version 7.1 of PHP will be of no use.
These considerations apply to all types of hosting plans except shared plans that do not allow running of different applications or databases.
Enablement of cutting edge technologies
It is found that may hosting providers let their clients configure servers by themselves, however, getting access to cPanel can facilitate such tasks in addition to performing other tasks such as WordPress or MySQL related databases.
Technologies that scale with needs
It is essential for your host to enable seamless migration to higher hosting plans including dedicated or cloud hosting to enable support to your enhanced hosting needs in future. Many companies are on an expansion spree and these need to add SSL, SSH, Git, or HTTP/2 to facilitate their incremental requirements.
This underlines the need to find a hosting provider that offers scalability as well as flexibility of hosting. Since website development is poised to get more and more complex with need for running Gulp.js on server for building PHP application related workloads. This underlines importance of easy migration to other hosting plans if the technology of Node.js is missing in your current hosting plan.
Dependable hosting service
Users are recommended to verify the validity of uptime guarantee that is usually pegged at 99.99 percent. If the host is prepared to back the claim with SLA, then you need not be concerned. This also highlights significance of authentic hosting reviews and opinions of other customers.
While assessing the ability of the host in terms of instant technical support, you need to consider difference between time zones as well. The top hosting providers arrange for timely server updates and scheduled maintenance to make sure that your mission critical site stays active and healthy.
Justifiable pricing
There is a need to find a hosting service that offers hosting plans at justifiable and appropriate costs. Users should also periodically assess these prices whenever there is a need to move up to higher plans.
The most vital aspects of hosting that decide the costs are bandwidth requirements, disk space, and processing power. New technology has ushered utility based pricing that can turn out to be a mathematician’s nightmare due to their inherent complexities. It is better to stick to hosting plans that require users to pay fixed amount which is based on resources.