It’s one of the most significant choices you’ll make regarding your online presence. Your web hosting service can be the difference between presenting a reliably robust site and one that spends more time down than up. For this reason, gaining a good understanding of how to conduct a web hosting comparison is essential to your success in this regard.
Here are few key things to look for.
What Your Site Needs to Do
Before you can make any sort of a comparison, you must first have a clear idea of what you need. If you’re building a huge eCommerce site with the potential of drawing Los Angeles rush-hour traffic you’re going to need a lot of bandwidth, a lot of storage capacity and exceptionally robust security protocols.
How Unlimited Is Unlimited?
While you’ll see a number of providers toss that term about, the reality is unlimited is provisional at best. Delve into the terms of service and you’ll usually find unlimited is indeed unlimited—up to a certain point. Again, if your site is going to be drawing lots of traffic, you want to make your chosen host’s “unlimited” is the most unlimited you can get.
Conversely, if your site is a basic one with only few pages and light traffic, you won’t have those concerns. Going forward, if you need more features, what are the upgrade options? Additionally, how responsive is the server? Slow load times can cost customers as people grow more impatient about waiting for sites to load every day.
Is That Introductory Rate Really a Good Deal?
A lot of companies offer super low “introductory rates, only to jack the price up substantially after the trial period ends to make up the difference over the balance of the contracted period.
And oh, by the way, to get that super-low rate you may well have to agree to a three-year contract to ensure they have time to recoup that loss leader pricing. In some cases, renewal fees can be as much as four times the sign-up rate. What’s more, can you get a refund if you’re not happy with the
service?
When, Where and How Support is Provided
When making a web hosting comparison support is very important. It’s more a question of when support will be needed, as opposed to whether support will be needed. Problems have a nasty habit of developing in the middle of the night in the middle of a weekend—during your biggest sale of the year.
When it’s your turn to deal with it, you’re going to want to get a live body on the phone to talk you through the solution. That’s why anything less than 24/7/365 live support is simply not good enough. You also want to know the provider’s average response time to problems.
Speaking of downtime, what are the host’s server reliability and uptime guarantees? You also need to take a look at the site backup options to ensure you can get back online quickly if yours crashes.
As you’re considering how to do a comparison of web hosting services, examining these factors will help you choose the best provider for your needs today—and into the future. Speaking of which Yahoo Small Business hosting stacks up nicely in all of these regards. Check it out today!
