10 Things to remember while purchasing web hosting

Choosing a new web hosting could be a headache for you if you’re a newbie.Many web hosting provider claim to offer better web hosting service than competitors, but who knows the reality.

Web hosting providers show you different features which you never heard about, and most features are provided by all companies.Web hosting companies claim to provide ultra fast loading speed, but in reality check only few web hosting companies succeeded to provide good quality of server with less downtime.

Our today’s article is to provide you some tips which you can use to purchase the best web hosting provide for your new website or blog.Cheap hosting services looks easy to grab, but hard to digest because they do not serve you the best and that is why we’re also looking to switch our web hosting service.

Tips to purchasing new web hosting

1.Downtime

Downtime means, when your website is unavailable or offline for a specific time period.Due to increase in downtime, your website may lose your traffic and customers too.Web hosting companies claim to provide more than 99% uptime, but do you know how much website downtime is acceptable?

There is no correct answer to this question and not one can tell you the exact downtime.There is a comparison between different types of downtime claim by different web hosting companies.

• 99.999% uptime = 5 minutes downtime / year
• 99.99% uptime = 53 minutes downtime / year
• 99.9% uptime = 8 hours 45 minutes downtime / year
• 99% uptime = 3.65 days downtime / year

Pro Tip : Go for a web hosting which provides At least 99.99% uptime.

2.First Time vs Renewal Fees

The second thing which always keep in mind before purchasing web hosting is to find out the renewal fees of the hosting service.Many web hosting services offer a hosting with a huge discount rate, but they charge double amount as renewal fees.

This is not a kind of a fraud because, web hosting companies provide discount to there first customer, so it is essential to read all the TOS of the company.

This is a screenshot, in which you can see the difference between the signup and renewal cost.

Data obtained from web hosting secret revealed

Pro Tip : You can ask personally or chat with company to find out the renewal price

3.Free SSL vs Paid

Recently, let’s encrypt launched the universal SSL service which allows everyone to host their website on HTTPS:/ / for free. Let’s encrypt provide universal SSL for everyone, but using universal SSL is not as simple as look.Not every web hosting provider support let’s encrypt SSL, but Siteground and other major web hosting providers support let’s encrypt free SSL.

You can see the list of the hosting provider support let’s encrypt universal SSL.

Many web hosting provider offer you a free SSL for one year.These SSL are entry level so you have to purchase the full SSL to secure your website after completing the first year of free SSL.

The main advantage of paid SSL certificate over free SSL certificate is that you willl get technical support to install it but very few SSL providers like ClickSSL is providing techinical support free of cost. If you don’t want to take SSL certificate from hosting provider and want to take it seperately then it is also possible.

Pro Tip: Go for the Full SSL from the starting or ditch the idea of using free SSL for only one year.

4.Security Level

Security level of a web host is important and a Web host with great security strength is worth to purchase.You can choose a cheap hosting which charge less that $5 montly, but cheap hosting doesn’t guaranty to secure your information.A good web hosting service will backup your website on the daily basis, but if they don’t offer backup, figure out how you’ll be able to do it yourself.

I’m using Bigrock and I do not have to worry about backups and site scans because the support team of Bigrock provides continuous report of Scans and other malicious script.

Security of your website should be your priority and that’s why you should purchase hosting from a reputed company.

Pro Tip: Choose GoDaddy, Siteground(For WordPress), bigrock or similar reputed web hosting.

5.Read Reviews and Ask Questions

Reviews are not always show you the negative side of a web hosting service.You should contact directly to the user of a specific web hosting.There are many third party website where you can read reviews and ask question directly from the user of a particular web hosting service.

Quora is a forum type website where you can ask questions directly from the users, just create an account and ask question and you’ll get many answer within a week.

There are other website similar to quora where you can ask question from the genuine users of the web hosting company.

Pro Tip: Do not follow the affiliate link, only genuine answer will provide the accurate information.

6.Location of Your Server

Once you read the testimonials and reviews of real users, now check the server is located in your area or not, because you need a good server speed to target the audience of a specific region.You can search on the internet or ask directly from the Web hosting company to host your website from where you want.

If you’re an US citizen and want to drive more traffic from USA, then choose US based server, but if you’re an looking to expand your business and targeting customers across the word, then use content delivery networks with your server, you can purchase or use the free CDN.If you’re targeting global market then CDN will work for you.

7.Hardware

A good machine give your visitors and customers a good experience, but outdated server slow your website speed which affect your website ranking and business too.So, checking the hardware details should be the priority before purchasing a web hosting.

Not every big company will provide you a better server which works perfectly, but most of them host your website on a new and better machine.A better machine will help to increase the uptime and that’s why major hosting provider charges are higher than other ordinary hosting providers.

8.A user Friendly Control Panel

A user friendly control panel is must for user because if you are working on a complicated control panel, your simple task become more tricky and take more time than average.There are few things which you can do without asking from your web hosting support team such as installing WordPress, setup email service and other.

But with a complicated control panel you have to search or you need help from support team.Most popular web hosting provider use Cpanel because this control panel is easy to use.

Pro tip: Choose a web host which provide Cpanel, Plesk or custom like Godaddy.

9.Domain

Everyone love free products and freebies, some companies like siteground offer there first time customer a free TLD domain, so users don’t have to purchase the domain.

Another thing related to Domain name is, how many website or domain names you can host on a single hosting service.If you’re looking to purchase two domain for your business then choose a plan on which you can host two or more website.This will help to lower your bill and you can manage your both websites from a single control panel.

Pro Tip : SIteground provide free Domain so choose it’s Grow Big plan.

10.Refund Policy

The last thing you should keep in mind while purchasing web hosting is the refund policy of web hosting provider.If you are facing more downtime or your website is not working good on web hosting, then you should ask for refund and cancellation of order.

Some hosting companies charge high cancellation fees, so it is better to know everything about refund on the cancellation of your order.

Pro Tip:

• Ask for time Period under you can get a refund.
• Ask how much you have to pay as cancellation fees.