So you’llGather the technical details of your website project and run through these steps to pick a webhost:
- Decide if you need a shared, VPS, cloud, or dedicated hosting account.
- Find a list of reputable hosting companies who offer the account type you require.
- Match the software, operating system, any any required packages of the hosting company to what’s current on each of those titles. Then remove a webhost from your list if it has components that are 2 or more major versions out of date, especially if the product is end of life (like PHP 5.5 and below).
- Do some online and offline review searching for each webhost you are looking at. Do your peers or web development company have a specific recommendation? Eliminate any hosts who have too many reports of overcrowded servers, terrible support, or broken infrastructure.
- Finally, choose a host with the best reputation for quality and an acceptable price point for the service.
If you can afford to move your site again in the near future, there are plenty of hosts who offer 15-30 day trials. Sometimes you don’t know how good or bad the company is until something actually goes wrong, and you are facing downtime or outages. With regards to sites serving high profile/critical services, Cloud Hosting and Dedicated packages will be warranted. On the other hand medium and small businesses can very often use a low tier (and most affordable) hosting account. It all depends on your site’s individual needs.
Webhost Relationship Bottom Line
Your web hosting company is one of those few vendors that you’ll never meet in person. Actually, you won’t even think about them at all if they do a spectacular job. Your site will just always be up and running! With a little bit of knowledge about your real server needs you can save you a good chunk of change, not buying more than you have to. Even so, you’ll wanr to avoid low tier providers – or your website will too often be inexplicably slow.
No seriously, just tell me who to use. Just give me a name.
You want a recommendation? Well okay, drop me a line and I’ll give you my rec’s.
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