Thread: How to choose a hosting company?

Im still looking into and learning all this website stuff and browsing many sites and reading reviews on many things related to websites and blogs.

So i will have a lot of questions.

How do you choose a good hosting company?

What do you need to look out for and why?

it depends mostly on your needs...

like for example there are bulk hosters, and there are those who give many features...like that..whats your need??

First start with a free hosting. if you are naive

Free Web Hosting - PHP, MySQL, FTP, Email.

understand the control panel settings and other basic features that they support.

Then move to paid domain

Originally Posted by harishsyndrome

First start with a free hosting. if you are naive

Free Web Hosting - PHP, MySQL, FTP, Email.

understand the control panel settings and other basic features that they support.

Then move to paid domain

yaar Harish
i see 0fees is not taking new sign ups now....is it so??

thats why i am using the 110mb...

No

Welcome to the Frontpage

I created this site 2 days before

And its under construction

110mb has no fantastico installer it seems!!!

So u can use any CMS.

0fees is really good full equipped control panel

but i cannot sign up...

^^ nice website

Free Web Hosting - PHP, MySQL, FTP, Email

Man its open!!

Dunno why u aint able to

Very cheap rate paid hosting plans are available at market. If u are serious about web hosting then go for a paid one. For all free plans having some hidden agendas. Once your site getting good traffic then they will show their original colour. Very nice and reliable hosting plans available for less than Rs 1000/- per year including free domain if interested click here

Choosing best hosting company is very difficult task. One should opt for hosting package with web host who provides 24/7 Live chat support. So that you can be in touch with them at any point of time.

Originally Posted by Preeti_20

Im still looking into and learning all this website stuff and browsing many sites and reading reviews on many things related to websites and blogs.

So i will have a lot of questions.

How do you choose a good hosting company?

What do you need to look out for and why?

First of all you should be aware of the applications that have been used in creating your website. If it has been created in ASP/ ASP.Net, you have no option other than choosing a Windows Web hosting plan, whereas if it has LAMP technology then you can go for a Linux platform. Once the platform is decided, you should make yourself aware of the requirements of your website and must have an estimate of the traffic that your website would receive.
If yours is a simple website and doesn't receive much traffic then a shared hosting plan would be just fine.
Now, while choosing a web hosting provider, you need to bear in mind that they should offer a good post sales service, they should be preferably be available 24x7.They should have a prompt and friendly technical support crew.You should be able to contact them via Phone,Live Chat or E-mails or tickets.They should be able to resolve the issues asap.
Before choosing a web hosting provider make sure you get in touch with them and let them know your requirements, get an estimated quote.In this way get quotes from few of the providers of the same caliber, so depending on your budget you can choose any of the shortlisted providers.

^^ Very nice explanation... Rep ++

Another thing is some hosting providers give you the luxury of cPanel, website editors for free... It makes life easier for newbies!

Its a good idea to read some user-reviews on internet before zeroing in on a particular host!

Originally Posted by itsmemad

^^ Very nice explanation... Rep ++

Another thing is some hosting providers give you the luxury of cPanel, website editors for free... It makes life easier for newbies!

Its a good idea to read some user-reviews on internet before zeroing in on a particular host!

Yup, control panel is indeed helpful for managing the hosting account, it not only eases the efforts of a newbie but the webmasters too.

Inaddition to reviews, one can also have a look at the customer testimonials.

For example my first site (was running on Pbase php scripts)was based on photography. So as you can see now the photos have multimegabytes of sizes. So it was a big hosting requirement. However pbase itself gives you with free file hosting but i thought having my own hosting will be better as i wanted to link ads, topix etc. My disk space was 5gb plan with unlimited bandwidth. I think one can have a free webhosting only for his hobbystic sites. Free hosts never provide you image hosting, video hosting,big files etc.(most of them)there are size limits. So you should take a good file host. Paid one.howeva for a newbee webmaster i will always say to use free file hosting cause you should learn first before doing any stuff. One of my new friends (wont tell his name)asked me to have a paid domain and paid hosting for our partnership portal,but i told him for i will rather do with free for now and paid for future.

Originally Posted by mail2sc

For example my first site (was running on Pbase php scripts)was based on photography. So as you can see now the photos have multimegabytes of sizes. So it was a big hosting requirement. However pbase itself gives you with free file hosting but i thought having my own hosting will be better as i wanted to link ads, topix etc. My disk space was 5gb plan with unlimited bandwidth. I think one can have a free webhosting only for his hobbystic sites. Free hosts never provide you image hosting, video hosting,big files etc.(most of them)there are size limits. So you should take a good file host. Paid one.howeva for a newbee webmaster i will always say to use free file hosting cause you should learn first before doing any stuff. One of my new friends (wont tell his name)asked me to have a paid domain and paid hosting for our partnership portal,but i told him for i will rather do with free for now and paid for future.

Yes that can be one of the alternatives, but there are more Cons than Pros of Free hosting. You do not have much control neither do you have much access to the website, the web hosting provider would would use your website for displaying ads or banners of other websites. You cannot take backup's, plus your website is hosted on a shared server which might be overloaded. This can result into bad performance of your website. And in web hosting it is important to have maximum uptime, which means that the website should be accessible most of the time.
One can look for a cheap web hosting provider instead of free hosting as usually there is no overselling done on these servers.

Hi

dont go for a free one, each provider will vary in their offerings, give your exact requirement.. people will help here..

Originally Posted by webhost18

Hi

dont go for a free one, each provider will vary in their offerings, give your exact requirement.. people will help here..

Yeah, good point stated by webhost18, one should as far as possible avoid free web hosting.There are lots of Cons than Pros. First of all you do not have enough control over the website data and the content, secondly you might come across situations where the web host has put up ads on your site.Such accounts are set up on a shared server with multiple accounts sharing the same IP address, incase any of those accounts involve in spamming, the IP itself gets blacklisted, so due to the misuse by a single account, all the account hosted on the server have to face the consequences.Search engines stop indexing the site with that IP. Hence, it is recommended to chose a cheap web hosting provider instead of Free host. To be on the safer part, it is good to have a dedicated IP assigned to the website. It also helps to get better rankings in search engines.

for webhosting try wifi4india

In order to determine a possible good host , one can carry the following

1. See how fast and good is their pre-sales response.
2. Findout reviews about their hosting from their existing customers in various forums like this one or Webhostingtalk. Are they overselling ?
3. See their money-back guarantee policy. This assures to try their service without loosing your money. In this period you can determine how good is their response on support as well.
4. Find out their Hardware Specs of the server in which they are providing various plans. Ask this during the pre-sales like what kind of CPUs, Backup policy, RAID on Hard disks etc. A good hardware and well configured server spec will avoid most of the support tickets. This saves your time too.

5. Find what is their uptime SLA policy if uptime is important for you ? A reliable host always refund 100% , if the uptime go down by 99% ( 99.9% uptime is industry standard ). In case of servers in India 99.9% network uptime is even better and above expectations.

Finally, if your budget allows, its worth to pay little bit more for a quality hosting rather going for cheaper priced providers and facing various problems like downtime , resource crunch etc.

Sales department must be helpful and sincere. That does your perception of a good hosting company.

Originally Posted by mail2sc

Sales department must be helpful and sincere. That does your perception of a good hosting company.

Yes I agree with this. Sales is the first point of contact when searching for a web hosting package. If the sales guys are able to clear all the doubts and queries about a particular package, we get a fair idea about the services the host offers.

While choosing any hosting , you should look for following things :

1)What are the mean of support provided by the hosting company?
2)From how many years is this hosting company in business?
3)How many clients they have ?
4)How many servers they have?
5)Does the hosting company provides money back policy?
6)Is the hosting company providing any extra features?