Criteria of choosing an ideal web hosting company
Before we talk about what it takes to be a cheap and good
quality web host, let's get to the fundamental first.
What is a Web Host?
A web host is a
service provider that places your web site on a computer which
is connected to the internet. The term for this 'computer' is
called a server.
A web hosting provider will typically
have a fast connection to the Internet and they may host
thousands of web sites on many servers. The web host essentially
rents out space to you so that you can get your website up on
the world wide web.
With a well-managed web host, you
can free yourself from worrying the up-keep of complicated
server technology and proper technical maintenance. That’s the
whole purpose of the web hosting companies. You should leave the
technical work to web hosting professional while you focus on
your own internet business.
Let’s begin...
Feature Offered
The features that web
hosting companies are offering are getting quite standard
nowadays.
The followings are some of the common features
you'll see in most web hosting plans:
- Control Panel
Control Panel is an interface where you can access your site on
the web server, allowing you to set-up and subsequently update
and customize your web site. Though cPanel is by far the most
popular control panel, some hosting providers customize their
own so that they can up-grade and expand it at will.
-
Diskspace
A vast majority of sites that don't have tons of
graphics, sound and video clips or downloadable files easily fit
in 50 MB of disk space. You should always leave yourself some
room for growth or check if the host has a bigger plan in case
you need to upgrade.
- Bandwidth
Bandwidth is the
amount of data transmitted or received through a unit of time.
In web hosting, bandwidth is consumed when visitors make
requests for files on your web site and download them to their
personal computers.
- Email Account
With POP3 email
accounts you can check email from Outlook, Netscape Mail, Eudora
or any other Email software.
- Scripting language
As
all our top 10 listings are using Unix and Linux platform, php,
perl and CGI are the languages we are talking about here. It is
best to choose a host that supports the latest version to
maximize the latest web technologies for the fee that you pay.
- Database
If your web site is going to store a lot
of data that should be dynamically accessible (like user
accounts, stock prices, maps, Interactive news, message boards
and forum etc.), you'll need to look for an account that offers
a database. MySQL is a powerful and most popular database
program that runs on the Linux operation system. It is able to
handle million of entries all at once. Its flexibility and speed
allow you to also store logs and pictures. MySQL is designed to
scale well under heavy traffic conditions and is ideal for
database-intensive or e-commerce-enabled Web sites.
Customer Service/Support
No matter if you
are an expert or a novice in web hosting, you need a web host
with good customer support system. What is the criteria of an
excellent customer support? Let us explain.
- How big is
the knowledge base?
This is particularly important for
those who want to search for quick answer without seeking direct
assistance from customer support staff. Due to the huge
database, normally it’s searchable. Some web hosting providers
will even make your life easier by making a video tutorial
guiding you step by step in setting up your new account. Very
useful for beginner.
- Responsive customer
service staff.
If you are too lazy to find the answer out of
a big pool of database, get the direct answer from someone who
knows it. Direct customer support comes in a few forms.
a.
Email support
b. Phone support: Normally, sales and
technical support uses separate phone line. A good phone support
staff knows what your problem is and answers with relevance.
c.Web Host like Lunarpages and Globat even have live
chat support. However, it’s not how many support channels that
are available but how responsive it is of the staff. You can
find out the hosting reviews and
ratings of each of our Top 10 Cheap Web Host.
Price to Disk Space / Price to Bandwidth
Ratio
Are you paying too much for your Web Hosting
Plan?
Having done the research on hundreds of web hosting
companies, in general, we’ve come to this conclusion: the more
disk space and bandwidth you are getting, the more expensive is
the monthly price.
To help you understand which price is
competitive enough for you to take up the offer, we have
categorized 5 different price range. For each price range, a
score of maximum of 10 is assigned. To understand the concept
behind this, please refer to the details here.
Popularity
A web
host might have the best feature offered, unbeatable customer
support and reliability in place but without an effective
marketing plan, it will go bust too. Let’s face it. If a web
hosting provider does not have sufficient members and steady
growth of new members, it’s very difficult to survive in this
highly competitive industry.
We judge the popularity of
a particular web hosting provider by looking at the number of
awards won, the reviews of other websites and the Alexa traffic
ranking.
All the hosting providers listed on our Top 10
Cheap Web Hosting Directory are among the top 40,000 most
visited websites in the world.
Reliability,
Speed and Uptime Guarantee
Nothing can hurt you
more than this: your visitors come to your web site only to find
that it’s not accessible. You lose credibility and possibly even
a sale. If your web host does not guarantee at least a 99%
uptime, leave the web host now!
To ensure maximum
uptime, installation of redundant back-up systems is essential.
Each web host has their own management systems to minimize
downtime. "Redundant" means that if any of the
Internet connections get interrupted, the alternate Internet
connection will take over.
We use Alertra software to
monitor the uptime of each of our top 10 web hosts.
As
for speed, even though routing, web server set up and local area
networks play a part in determining the speed of a site, the
main concern of how fast your site is depends very much on the
types of network connections.
Many hosting providers
still connect to the Internet through T1, or T3 connections.
This is not the case for our top 10 hosts- they are using OC
(Optical Carrier) lines.
A T1 line will offer data
transfer rate of 1.5 Mbps (megabits per second), while a T3 line
can supply data transfer rates of 43Mbps. OC-1 refers to a
circuit that transmits 51.85Mbps. Higher levels are multiples of
that speed. Ultra-High Speed OC3 and OC12 lines offers 155Mbps
and 622Mbps respectively. Some hosting providers have
connections to major internet backbones at the speed of OC48
(2488Mbps) and OC96 (4976Mbps).
