Searching for a web hosting company can be an overwhelming task. If you are new to web hosting, the multitude of hosting companies and the variety of features, packages, and technical jargon can be intimidating. Even If you’ve had a hosting provider in the past, and your experiences have been less than stellar, it can be hard to take the plunge again knowing you’re bound to be disappointed.
Shared hosting sucks. Shared hosting is like moving into an apartment building in some foriegn neighborhood. Your host may put you in a building with college party animals and drug dealers, who leave trash everywhere, hog the elevators, and clog the hallways.
Even if you find a great host you can still have an experience that sucks. Hosting companies often have hundreds of servers and your bad luck might land you on a slow or buggy one. You may have email problems after your host is blacklisted because of spammers. A hacker may take down your server with a DoS attack on one of your neighbors. The person who answers your support call may be a lifesaver or an I.T. know-it-all who can’t be bothered.
When it comes to web hosts, it seems to be a classic case of choosing the best of the worst. Finding a good host is incredibly difficult, maybe even hopeless, but here are a few suggestions on how to increase your chances of finding a host that will work for you.
What Do You Really Need From a Host?
Before you begin looking, make a list of your web hosting requirements.
Every host will offer a full menu of features and services all touting to be the answer to your dreams. However most of these features will be completely worthless, or at least of no importance to the majority of people. How many email or FTP accounts do you really need? And any other services or software that is included usually has a free or open-source counterpart available for download online with much better features. Webalizer and AWstats are two examples of popular statistics software often included in webhosting packages. However Google’s free Analytics service is much more feature rich and is quickly becoming the industry standard.
Here are a few things that may actually be important to you:
Bandwidth This isn’t the most important criteria, but I list it first because many hosts use it as an enticement, tempting you with enormous amounts or even unlimited bandwidth. You’ll probably never be able to take advantage of it because of resource limitations (see TOS below), and the typical blog (a couple hundred page views a day) probably uses only a few gigabytes in a month, at most (if you’re really worried about pumping terabytes through the pipes, you should give some thought to VPS’s or dedicated hosting). But some hosting plans do have ridiculously low bandwidth allotments, so be sure to give yourself room to grow.
TOS (Terms of Service) Every host is going to place some kind of limitation on your resources (CPU and memory), and it’s a good thing they do; shared hosting only works when everyone plays nice with their neighbors. Some will be vague about resource limitations, others more explicit (e.g., limiting it to some percentage). You’ll have to dig for this info, which is usually buried in the TOS. Make sure you read this document, which will also have details about refunds, uptime guarantees, and other important details.
Number of Domain Pointers How many domains will you need? Many budget shared hosting plans limit you to one, or perhaps a few, domains. If you intend to have more than one site, or to publish more than one blog, make sure you can host all your domains under one plan.
Number of Databases Some hosts offer unlimited domains, but give you a paltry number of databases to work with. Sure, you can put more than one blog in a single database, but I wouldn’t recommend it.
Control Panel You’re going to spend a fair amount of time poking around in your control panel, so make sure it’s user-friendly. If you’re used to cPanel, which is almost comon among hosts, you’ll probably find a proprietary backend (like those used by GoDaddy and DreamHost) somewhat awkward to use. Most hosts offer a demo of their control panel. Check it out before you make your final choice.
Blog-friendly? If you’re going to publish a blog, look for a blog-friendly host. I’d avoid GoDaddy, for example, which has awkward backends and wasn’t, particularly WordPress-friendly. Most hosts offer Fantastico, or some other method of one-click installation of popular blogging packages. Make sure your host has the required versions of PHP, MySQL, or any extensions that are required (e.g., WordPress requires mod_rewrite for permalinks).
Customer Service Your host may offer online, email, chat and/or phone support. If you’re new to hosting (and even if you’re not) I’d recommend finding a host that offers phone support. Trying to explain what you don’t understand in an email or in a chat can be laborious and frustrating. You won’t always get an immediate answer by phone (sometimes a more tech savvy person will have to get back to you, usually by email), but it’s a relief when you do. And there are few things more infuriating than not being able to talk to someone when your website is down.
Affiliate Program This is the least important thing to consider, But I’d hesitate before choosing a host that didn’t offer a referral fee. Any blog with traffic should be able to get a few referrals over the course of a year and with most hosts you’ll make more than enough to pay for your own hosting.
Comparing Hosts
It’s impossible to predict your future satisfaction with a host for reasons outlined above. There are few reliable sources of comparative information about web hosts, and testimonials (including mine) are perhaps the least reliable source of all. Be especially skeptical of review sites; most of them are affiliate link farms. Nothing wrong with making a commission for a referral but a site that’s devoted to hosting will tend toward hyperbole. And keep in mind, as you do your research, that any popular host is likely to have a number of supporters and detractors due to the sheer number of customers, you can never please everyone.
First, limit the field by using the list you just created of what’s really important to you to find a handful of hosting candidates that meet your needs. Then, start your comparative research.
Google I’d start by searching Google for comments about your potential host. Also, try “[your potential host] sucks” (don’t forget the quotes).
Now, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, as Carl Sagan said. The lack of Google results for your potential host may not be an indication of anything. But a multitude of “[your host] sucks” results should be a red flag.
Hyperspin Don’t host with a company that doesn’t offer at least a 30-day money back guarantee. And while you’re in that honeymoon phase with your new host, sign up for Hyperspin’s free monitoring service. They’ll notify you immediately by email or SMS if your site goes down.
You’ll also find a ranking of hosts by uptime on Hyperspin, but it doesn’t tell you very much. The 100th ranked host (at least at the time of this writing) posted a respectable 99.740% uptime. And these rankings only include companies that pay to be monitored by Hyperspin; the fact that your host chooses not to pay for this service doesn’t mean it’s unreliable. The same is true of Netcraft, which publishes a similar performance ranking.
WebSitePulse If you want to get a quick sense of the relative performance of a host, you can run a website test at WebSitePulse.
Status Pages, Forums, and Blogs You may have to hunt for these, but most hosts have status pages (where you can monitor uptime), forums (where you can get the pulse of their customer community and see how responsive the host is), and company blogs (where they may write about customer concerns). These are often the best sources of information. DreamHost has aDreamHost Status site and one of the better blogs. AN Hosting lets you check the status of any of their servers online.
A Place to Start
I’ve given you some things to think about, but where to begin? Since I’ve had some direct experience with a handful of hosts, I’ll briefly share some of my experiences here.
AN Hosting Blogging Photographer is currently hosted by AN Hosting. AN Hosting offers a generous package that includes 625 GB of disk storage, 6 TB (that’s terrabytes!) of bandwidth, 20 domains on one account, a free domain for life, and unlimited MySQL databases for $6.95 a month (yearly payment).
1&1 I have actually never hosted with 1&1 however I do register all of my domain names with them, and they have had great customer service anytime I’ve had a problem. They have a number of plans to choose from starting at 2.99 a month, and are currently running a special where you get the first 6 months free.
ThinkHost ThinkHost is one of the more popular hosts, at least among social conscious bloggers. It’s the host some people love and other people love to hate. It markets itself as a “Green” web host committed to social change. They claim to be 100% carbon neutral, but have not personally seen much information to back up these claims. They do offer generous unlimited plans, for only $7.95 a month (yearly). It all sounds good, but remember when something is too good to be true, it probably is. I have heard of a number of horror stories, from sites constantly crashing, to stone age loading times, and extremely poor customer service. But don’t take my word for it, make sure to research, and use the Honeymoon period to your advantage.
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