What kind of hosting account do you really need?
What are the most important factors when choosing hosting company and how to choose the best hosting for your website?
In my previous article I mentioned that I worked for the largest hosting company in Bulgaria with around 20,000 customers and I have professional experience in creating and maintaining hosting accounts meaning the information in this article is 100% tested.
You should not start with the most expensive hosting package. You can always update a single parameter if needed or you can update your entire hosting account to more expensive hosting plan with higher parameters.
What values are sufficient for a new website?
- Apache 2 server is highly recommended
- Disk space - 100 MB min
- FTP Account
- Email - at least 10 mailboxes
- Database - at least one data base
- Traffic - no less than 10GB per month
- Traffic Analyzer – it will show you how your visitors found your website and through which key phrases.
- FrontPage extensions
- PHP 5, MySQL 5
- cronjobs maintenance – usually some processes on your website can be automated (like autoresponder, daily reports, statistics … ) and the timing of the execution is set through cronjobs.
- Daily backup for files and databases
- Access to FTP logs, Apache logs, email logs, admin panel logs - these will allow you to investigate the source if a problem occurs.
- Live 24 / 7 support – one hour response time is fair option (our response time was set to 30 minutes).
This article contains mainly technical information but you must be well informed about the meaning and importance of every single parameter because this is the home of your website and the performance level of your hosting company will play substantial role in your website performance.
How important is the choice of hosting company?
If the hosting server is down, the search engine spider will not index your website and it will disappear from the main search engine index until the next crawl which may happen even a month later!
If the hosting company tolerates SPAM, copyright infringement and other bad practices, your website is located in so called bad neighborhood and because you are on a shared host you could share also some negatives.
One possible situation looks like this: another user is sending SPAM, logicaly this action gets reported and the server gets blacklisted. Now you are unable to send emails until the other user issue gets resolved.
Therefore, when choosing a hosting company,
don’t be lead by the price but
by the quality of the service it provides.
You can also sign for the smallest period available (ours was three months) and if the company meets your requirements, renew the contract, if not – find better one.
Many companies offer discount when you renew your hosting account so you must discuss this option when researching the market (our discount was 20%).
