Beware Buyers: Best Web host selection
Emergence and popularity of internet has changed our life. Everyone is going online these days from a business giant to one man companies operating from the comfort of their bedrooms. Web hosting service providers actually provide the platform for you to run your website on. Rushing into the decision to choose the provider not per your needs leaves you aching for quite some time. It is not necessarily fault of the host, but mostly the owner of website is the real culprit for not choosing the best web host. Each host may have different options within web hosting, so if you select the one offering for example ASP only and you have the technical expertise on PHP, then you are bound to face problem until you shift to some other provider. Or you were running your website fine, but a recent update in technology arrives and your host is not supporting it. So in short there could be many issues with your host and migrating to new one does not ensure that no problems will occur in future too. We discuss few aspects that people consider before finalizing their best web host, which can make or break their website venture.
Look and Feel
Many users especially the non technical ones are usually impressed with the look and feel and overall aesthetics offered by the host. All that glitters is not gold, so there are numerous cases where owner impressed by the look and feel acquired the services of certain host and it all gone to dogs in the long run. Sites offering good look and feel are not necessarily culprit otherwise. However one must not base his/her decision exclusively on the look and feel aspect when choosing best web host. So analyze the host and its services from other perspectives as well. Look and feel though is very important considering it is the interface between you and your visitors; however there is a lot of stuff happening behind at backend as well. So if you feel like it, acquire the expert to make a good judgment. In a nut shell, aesthetics should be one of the criteria in your checklist while choosing the best web host, but not the only one.
Cost
Mostly the decision to chose the best web host for your website depends on the single most important factor- Cost. Many advertisements and other promotional items must have passed your eyes on internet claiming to give you unimaginable things and at extremely unbelievable lower cost. A layman or less technical person can easily fall into the trap of practically infinite disk space and gigantic high bandwidth along with customer service, service maintenance, guaranteed uptime close to 100%, advanced feature to name a few. Don’t just believe what they are saying? Keep in mind every business on planet has some purpose attached to it, and leaving extremely low minority, the only outcome expected from any business is money, lots and lots of money. So change your perspective, if the cost is unimaginably low, how is company even surviving, as from employees salaries to office rent, from electricity charges to server maintenance, from hard drives’ cost to building maintenance charges the host must be bearing so many costs. So there must be some hidden costs, some corners to get away from the claim. There must be something in the TOS and policies making you chargeable for certain basic services by your so called best web host. TOC may contain clauses not allowing you to actually consume the maximum web space and bandwidth as claimed. Talk to people, search the internet to see how good the host actually is. How much is the downtime, how good is the customer service? How good they are at upgrading themselves? How easy it is to change the website outlook? Is it supporting the secured SSL based transactions? So don’t go to people making exaggerated magical claims, calculate your budget and identify the features you need and then based on your research you can chose the best web host.
Research
Haste makes waste; you must have heard it plenty of times in your life. So take your time, do R&D over the internet before finally selecting your best web host. There are many forums available online, where website owners and users share how satisfied or disgruntled they are from their current or previous website hosting service provider. One of the most popular forum in this regard is WebHostingTalk.com. Shortlist the vendors whose offers are closer to your needs and check their real worth on these online forums. Using their searching tool, all you need to do is to punch in name vendor’s name and a river of information about the host will come to you for analysis. You may also talk to your friends who are running a website through a host. Even in the current age of technology ‘Word of mouth’ carries a lot of weightage. Carefully read Term of Service and other policy documents to identify the catches and pinpoint best web host. These documents will also reveal what kind of restrictions they have on entities like disk space, bandwidth etc. Research will also allow seeing into the future expected needs of your website, for instance checking if the migration from host site to another site is easy. Check how good the host is in adopting to updates and newer technologies. Many companies claim to refund money if you are not satisfied, again refer to the policy documents to see if it is really the case or just a marketing gimmick or just a lie.
Rene Descartes a famous European philosopher of 16th century said “Dubito ergo cogito ergo sum” meaning “I doubt therefore I am”. So key to success in your best web host hunt is the skeptical eye and critical analysis of their offerings. Read what is stated simply and between the lines you will be successful in finding the most cost effective one fulfilling all your website requirements.0
