How to Find The Best Web Hosting For Your Next Website?

If you are a beginner in the website building and webmastering world, you’ve got a lot of things to learn before you can claim success. One of those things is knowing how to choose a good web hosting service for your next website.

The web hosting market is overloaded with all sorts of solutions and deals. One thing that is certain is that there isn’t a single web host that can satisfy the needs of every website, because of the varying structure and technical requirements of each.

Searching review sites for recommendations may not always give you the best results. Many of those sites are biased toward the companies that pay them the highest commissions.

Making your own list of the features and specifications to look for in a web hosting service is the right way to go about locating the best provider for you. And that’s what we aim to help you with in this article.

The following are some of the most important things to have on your checklist as you search for a host for your website.

Uptime Guarantee

Uptime is a critical metric of the quality of any Internet service, including website hosting. Frequent downtime is very frustrating for both the site owner and visitors, and it can lead to significant losses in traffic and revenue.

To be a little realistic, no company can maintain a perfect 100% uptime score because of routine server maintenance. But that should not cause more than a few minutes of downtime from time to time (like once or twice a month).

A reliable web hosting provider should readily guarantee an uptime of no lower than 99.9%, and that’s the minimum guarantee to look for.

SSD Storage

Long gone are the days of slow HDD drives. But some of the older web hosts still use HDD to power their servers, and you definitely should avoid those.

SSD drives are now the standard storage devices used by all of the renowned providers in the industry. Having your site’s files and databases stored on an SSD drive is one big step toward improving its loading speed and performance.

Web Server Software

Typically, most hosting services utilize the Apache web server software. It is free and widely used and supported by the community.

Although Apache offers decent performance for most use cases, there are better options you can opt for if you are looking for superior performance. One of the better alternatives is LiteSpeed.

As a premium commercial web server software, LiteSpeed comes at a price, which many users would argue is totally worth it given the increased performance it delivers.

Server Caching

Caching both static and dynamic content on the server level is one of the most effective ways to improve the speed of a website. Not only that, it also reduces consumption of server resources, which can massively cut the cost of the hosting service.

Some hosts implement basic caching systems, while others have more advanced and fully optimized caching systems in place to ensure the fastest content loading possible.

Many of the professional WordPress hosting companies put a lot of emphasis on their server caching technology because it does indeed make a remarkable difference.

Server Location

The physical location of the data center where your website is hosted is another factor that can affect its speed. The closer the server is to the visitor’s location, the faster the website should load, and vice versa.

That’s why it’s important that you choose a server location in the same country as your primary targeted audience, or at least as close to them as possible.

So, for example, if the majority of your website’s visitors are located in the USA, you should pick a web host that is based in the USA with their servers also located within the country.

In case your website targets a global audience located in many different countries, you should consider using a CDN to speed up your website on a global scope. Some companies offer a CDN with their plans either for free or as a paid add-on.

Email Limits

Email is an essential feature you’d want in a web hosting plan — unless of course you intend to use a third-party email service like Google Workspace and whatnot.

A lot of the plans you’ll see on the market include an unlimited number of email accounts, while others may only allow a limited number.

In either case, there are usually other limits on email usage that may not be clearly specified on the sales page.

Shared hosting companies place certain limits on the size of each email account, the number of messages that can be sent within a given period of time, and other limitations.

Take some time to search for the full technical details of the plan you intend to use and make sure that whatever email limits are in place won’t be a problem for your project.

Technical Support

The importance of prompt technical support cannot be overstated when we’re talking about web hosting services.

Software and hardware glitches can happen at any moment, and when they do, you want to rest assured that the support team will be doing their best to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.

Most companies promise you the best 24/7 support service, but you can’t just take their word for it without doing your due diligence.

Always search for other customers’ opinions and ratings of the support service of the company you have in mind before signing up with them.

You can refer to unbiased review sites, such as TrustRadius and TrustPilot, to find countless objective reviews. You can also check out SiteWays.pro to discover some of the top-rated web hosting companies that excel in technical support.

Control Panel

There are a few different control panels used by web hosts. The three most popular ones are cPanel, DirectAdmin and Plesk. Most website owners prefer cPanel because of its ease of use and rich features.

Some providers use their own custom-built control panel. This is commonly seen in managed hosting solutions, such as managed WordPress hosting.

Regardless of which control panel is offered, you should make sure it’s reasonably simple to use, well documented, and includes the most essential tools any website owner needs; such as a file manager, phpMyAdmin, SSL installation, backup manager, etc.

If you are unfamiliar with the control panel being offered, ask the host if they have a live demo or a video walk-through so that you get a clear idea of the functionality and design of the interface you will be working with.