How to choose a website host

How to choose a website host

Over the years we’ve had the opportunity to work with many website hosting companies – good and bad. There are many factors that you need to weigh up when choosing a website hosting company – but when all other features of the provider have been considered – try our one simple tip below to finding a good website host.

Things to consider when choosing a host.

Firstly, you need to weigh up what kind of hosting you need. There are plenty of lists online about the “top 10 steps to choosing a web host”. But don’t focus too much on these and just think about your own needs.

  • What kind of custom website are you building?
  • How much space do you need?
  • How much web traffic volume can the hosting plan handle?
  • Do you want a fast host (better for user experience and SEO)?
  • Can the website be speed optimized on the host?
  • Where do you want to host the website (Australia or internationally)?

These are some of the basic questions to be answered. Have a plan with your website hosting to know what will happen over the next 12 months and into the future.

Price.
This is obviously an important factor when choosing a website hosting company. You can get cheap hosting, but often you get what you pay for. If you’ve just spent thousands of dollars designing and building a website, you really shouldn’t cheap out at the last moment and get a slow, limited website host.

Upgradability.
Can the website host be upgraded? This is a great option for new websites just starting out, you can start with a smaller host (disk space, traffic bandwidth, speed etc) and as your needs change, you can simply upgrade the website hosting to a bigger more powerful plan.

Managed Service.
Is the hosting a managed service? Get managed website hosting if you want the hosting provider to maintain the host. A well maintained web host usually includes security patches and software updates, as well as monitoring. With our managed hosting plans, we’ve layered on extra services and built in extra redundancies to ensure quality performance and reliability.

Our one final simple trick for choosing a good host.

Finally our simple trick to choosing a good website hosting company.

All things being equal – you’ve done your research and found a couple of good website hosting companies that provide the type of hosting you require at a reasonable price… now simply phone their technical support line.

You’d be amazed (or shocked?!) at the various levels of technical support these website hosting companies provide. Hopefully you’ll never need to contact them, but when you do it’s usually at a critical time when something has gone very wrong with your website hosting and good, responsive customer service is urgent.

We recently had the unfortunate experience to need to call one of Australia’s largest hosting companies (based in Melbourne) on behalf of a client, and had to wait on hold several times for over an hour each time.

Before you buy website hosting, call their technical support line and see how long they take to respond. This will tell you a lot about their level of service.