Hosting : Points must be checked before choosing a hosting service

We have written about Virtual Dedicated Server (VPS / VDS), Dedicated server and article on what must to be looked for while choosing a server for WordPress.

In this article, we will discuss the general points; which must be looked for before choosing a web hosting service : be it a shared server, a dedicated server or a virtual dedicated server.

Which hosting service is right for you?

There are plenty of websites those offer hosting services but not all are very reliable. First of all, you have to set your goal and the type of blog you intend to have. For WordPress, we already wrote the specific needs.

Points must be checked before choosing a hosting service

Quality of the Web Hosting Service: Look at the quality of web service, writing style, their website’s design and other points. All these will give you an approximate idea of professionalism.

Pricing: If you are seeking too cheap hosting that is actually something that is wrong. Cheap hosting services in general have worse support and bad uptime.

Monthly Transfer limit (for Virtual Private Server and Dedicated Server): How many visitors on average your blog will have? 250 GB/month is generally enough for usual blogs with 20K visitors. Now, if your one page weighs 2GB (for example Photo Blogs), you have to seek higher Transfer Limits.

Capacity or Disk space: 10-20 GB is enough for a single website with 30K pages. Keep in mind, we are not calculating special blogs like video blogs or Photo Blogs. Also you have to leave plenty of empty space for caching, prefetch data etc.

Support of the web hosting service: Simply ask a question to find out how long it takes to answer. We were finding a hosting service for another domain. Our question was to online support, but there was no one online, so it became an offline message. It has been a week since then, we have not received any answer.

Reviews of the Hosting service: Forums are better to rely about Hosting Services than blogs. Most blogs are affiliates of one hosting company or the other and the reviews are not neutral.

Finding a good suitable hosting company is very painful. If you are going for the first time, it is probable, you have to change. The most common reasons to change the Hosting service are worst support and downtime.