40 Million Web Hosting Providers To Choose From

There are more than 40 million web hosting companies to choose from, and they are all eager to add your business to their portfolio. How can you find and distinguish the top web hosting providers from the rest? Below, I’ve outlined some important factors to consider when selecting a web hosting provider.

Security

Once your site goes live, the security of your website is the most critical factor to consider. You should be 100 percent convinced that the technology that brings your web project to life is of the greatest caliber and is highly safe. If you intend for your website to handle customer information and accept online payments, you should select a hosting company who can provide a server with encryption capabilities and the capacity to build up a dedicated secure server on demand.

Server Space

Before committing to a hosting service, consider how much disk space you will need to host your website. A acceptable quantity is between 500 MB and 1 GB, which is plenty for any small business, unless you intend to run a software repository, image gallery, or file sharing website. In an effort to outperform their competitors, web hosting providers offer customers a variety of hosting packages, many of which include unneeded disk space for a low price. In many instances, I discovered that hosting providers take shortcuts to provide customers with an excellent hosting package that only looks good on paper.

Reliability

The hosting provider’s dependability is vital. The amount of time they have been in operation, their percentage of uptime, the minimum uptime you should expect, which is at least 99.5%, as well as their backup and data recovery policies and practices. Some hosting services have multiple data centres, and some may even allow you to select the location of your server. The closer the server is to you, the better, as file transfers and server contact will occur at a faster rate. This may be a good question to ask the corporation during the last phone contact.

Support

Technical support should unquestionably be included in a web hosting plan. Professional web hosting companies provide customers with a support ticket system, which tracks all of your inquiries and notifies you automatically by e-mail or SMS when they are updated. The support system also allows you to review the status of tickets you’ve submitted, as well as set priorities and examine response times.

PHP/CGI-Bin

Regardless of the type of website you intend to operate, you will likely need to install a CGI script at some point. Whether it’s a mailing list management script, contact form processor, or even a sophisticated credit card processing script, your hosting account must permit you to install and execute them. This requires access to a particular folder called “CGI-Bin” on your server. As a security measure, some hosting accounts will only let the use of “pre-installed” scripts. These are scripts that the company’s owners have installed and set to ensure that they function properly and do not negatively impact server performance. It’s always excellent, if you have the skills, to be able to install and modify your own scripts to meet your specific requirements. You should also ensure that the account you select supports the programming language used to create your scripts, such as PHP, Perl, etc.