When you’ve invested weeks into creating the perfect business website, your choice of web hosting provider can make or break its success.
The correct web hosting provider assures consistent performance, reduces downtime, and improves security while remaining under budget. Choose the wrong one, and you could face poor loading speeds and unreachable support, leading to frustrating business and user experiences.
But with no fewer than 745 hosting providers available, how exactly do you choose the right one?
This guide provides a step-by-step strategy for choosing a reliable web hosting provider, whether building a website for your business or looking for a reliable hosting partner to serve your clients.
Key Points
- A hosting provider provides the server space and tools needed to host website data and make websites available online.
- You can pick from several hosting options, including shared VPS, dedicated cloud, bare metal, and address hosting, based on the needs of your website.
- When choosing a hosting provider, look closely at storage capacity, bandwidth, uptime, security, scalability, and customer support.
- Compare price plans and seek recommendations and reviews to determine the best hosting service for your company or client.
With this guide, you can confidently explore different hosting options and choose the right pricing plan from a reliable provider. We’ll answer these key questions:
- What is a hosting provider?
- How do I choose a web hosting provider?
- Which provider should I choose?
But first, let’s review what a web hosting provider is.
What is a hosting provider?
A hosting provider provides the server space and infrastructure to host websites and other web applications, making them accessible to Internet users. Providers are responsible for maintaining the server infrastructure and ensuring your website remains active.
Each hosting provider rents out server space. However, they also provide other services like troubleshooting, server maintenance, and website security measures. The quality and reliability of these services serve as key differentiators when choosing a provider.
How to Choose a Web Hosting Provider
Every website has its own set of hosting requirements. Here is an 11-step plan to choose a web hosting provider based on those requirements.
1. Evaluate Your Requirements
When deciding on the best type and provider for hosting, there is no one-size-fits-all. Understanding your business or client’s requirements will help you choose a provider with plans tailored to those needs.
Here are some criteria to consider when looking for a provider:
- Size and type of site: The type and size of the site are major factors when determining how much storage, memory, and bandwidth to look for. For example, enterprise websites that require heavy data processing will require a different type of hosting than a single landing page for small businesses or startups.
- Performance requirements: Websites constantly loading pages and media will require high-performance requirements and more resources. On the other hand, static and informational websites can load well even with fewer resources.
- Traffic: Websites with high or fluctuating traffic will require higher bandwidths to load properly and avoid crashes than websites with low traffic.
- Data protection: Every website requires data protection. However, if the site handles sensitive information, hosts customer data, or processes payments, it will require additional security features.
- Regardless of your budget, you may locate a reliable web host.
2. Choose the kind of hosting that you would want to have.
After determining your website’s needs, focus on the best form of hosting for your company or client.
There are a variety of web hosting plans available; however, here are a few examples:
- Shared hosting: A single server area is used by several websites. This is ideal for businesses with limited budgets and low-performance requirements.
- Virtual private server (VPS): Websites get a dedicated virtual server space but share the physical resources.
- Dedicated server: A single client occupies both the physical resources and the virtual server space in dedicated hosting. This option is more secure and better than VPS or shared hosting but also costs more.
- Unlike physical or local servers, cloud servers host websites.
- WordPress hosting: This form of hosting offers services for websites created with WordPress, one of the most popular content management systems (CMSs) that makes website construction easier. Currently, more than 35 million websites are powered by WordPress.
- Magento hosting: These plans optimize resources for e-commerce sites on Magento, another popular CMS.
- WooCommerce Hosting: Another option for e-commerce sites is WooCommerce, which adds commerce functionality to WordPress.
- Bare metal servers: This highly customizable hosting option offers dedicated hardware and complete control over the infrastructure.
You can also maintain the servers yourself or opt for managed hosting services. With managed hosting, the provider performs most server-related tasks, such as routine maintenance and troubleshooting to maintain uptime.
Each type of hosting has its benefits and suits different clients. For example, VPS hosting may be more suitable for websites with large media files and multiple plugins, as it provides dedicated virtual resources. On the other hand, a beginner website owner may benefit from a managed WordPress hosting plan.
Use our comprehensive website hosting guide to learn about the various hosting choices.
3. Find providers that offer the type of hosting you need
Every hosting service offers its unique collection of features. If you decide to use shared hosting for your website, a VPS hosting provider can’t do much for you.
So, focus your search on companies that supply the hosting you require. There are hosting providers that focus just on one specific sort of hosting. Some stand out due to the variety of services they offer, which includes WordPress plans and dedicated servers.
Find a service specializing in managed hosting if you’re not sure what you’re doing or would rather not deal with the headache of server management. Once you’ve written down a few promising options, you can evaluate them using the other steps in this guide to finalize your decision.
To find out which hosting companies popular websites use, you can utilize programs such as Hosting Checker or BuiltWith. Built With also provides data on the best providers and how many websites use them.
Check out our selection of the most affordable VPS hosting providers.
You may need specialized templates and hosting for your personal website if you are setting one up for specialized professions, such as, chip designers. Check out Personal Website Templates for Chip Designers: The Ultimate Guide.
4. Check Storage and Bandwidth Requirements
Storage and bandwidth metrics vary between providers. Some companies offer a fixed amount of storage space with each plan and charge for any additional memory usage.
Other companies offer plans where you only pay for the storage space you use each month.
The same goes for bandwidth. Hosting providers may cap the available server capacity so that your website can only handle a certain amount of traffic at a time. The alternative is a pay-as-you-go plan with limitless bandwidth, giving you access to infinite server capacity.
The best way to figure out your storage and bandwidth needs is to calculate your current website size and traffic. The next step is to select a package that provides more data storage and bandwidth than you need.
Let’s say your website pages are about 5MB each, and you have an average of 1,000 visits per month, with each visitor checking about three pages. Subtract 5 MB from 1000 x 3 to get 15,000 or 15 GB of bandwidth each month.
You can choose any plan that offers more than 15GB of bandwidth per month. However, we recommend staying at least 20% above your current requirement to accommodate any fluctuations in traffic and data, so your ideal plan will offer more than 18GB/month.
Opt for a plan with limitless bandwidth and scalable storage if you expect big traffic spikes.
5. Review Hosting Uptime and Reliability
Among the many considerations when picking a web host, reliability and uptime rank high. Even a minute of downtime can make your website unavailable to customers, resulting in thousands of dollars in losses.
Over two-thirds of interruptions result in costs above $100,000, as reported by the Uptime Institute.
To avoid such losses, choose a hosting provider that offers uptime guarantees.
Some providers may offer 99.9% or 99.99% uptime—the general rule of thumb: the closer to 100%, the better.
Also, ensure that the hosting provider has multiple data centres worldwide. This will provide better uptime as website functions can be moved to a different location in case of region-specific issues.
6. Prioritize speed and performance
The locations of a hosting provider’s servers also play a role in determining site speed. The latency decreases with increasing distance from the server. Users close to server locations experience faster site load times and solid performance.
Consider hosting providers with servers in multiple locations to create a uniform experience for users worldwide. This reduces load times for all customers, regardless of location.
Also, look for plans that include caching. This technology temporarily stores downloaded data so users can quickly access it when revisiting web pages.
You can also look for providers that combine server hosting plans with content delivery networks (CDNs). These advanced networks rely on caching to store data in multiple locations to improve website speed and performance.
7. Check for security and compliance features
Since the provider’s server space hosts all of your website’s files, choosing a provider with strong security features is important. Poor security makes your website vulnerable to cyberattacks, which can cause customers to lose confidence in your company and hurt your revenue.
There were 6.06 billion malware attacks in 2023 alone. To protect your business or customers from such breaches, look for the following security features:
- Regular backups: Automatic backups hosted on secure servers to restore data in the event of a breach.
- SSL certificates: SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificates to encrypt data transfers between the server and the user’s browser. Websites with SSL certificates display an “https:” sign indicating they are secure.
- Firewalls: Security features that prevent unauthorized access to website data and protect several attacks, such as phishing and malware.
- DDoS protection: A feature to protect against distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, a type of cyberattack that sends large amounts of malicious traffic to a website.
- Multi-factor authentication verifies identities to prevent unwanted access to website data.
- Access controls: Controls permissions to ensure that users only access authorized parts of the website and server data.
- Payment Protection: The Payment Card Industry (PCI) must comply to safeguard financial and payment information.
Additionally, check whether the hosting provider complies with relevant standards, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). Without proper compliance, you may risk exposing your user’s private information, leading to legal action.
8. Find Reliable Hosting Support
Web hosting and server issues are inevitable, even with the best providers. A responsive and reliable support team helps address these issues quickly, minimizing unwanted consequences.
Look for hosting providers offering 24/7 real-time customer service via phone, email, or chat channels.
Ensure that the customer support representatives are skilled and experienced in dealing with web server hosting features, particularly downtime and server functionality.
Some hosting companies may only give on-demand specialized help with higher-priced packages. In this case, check out the detailed knowledge base and self-help videos if you’re opting for a lower-priced plan.
For tips on managing your website effectively, check out our article on How to Manage a Development Website.
9. Compare Pricing Plans
While cost shouldn’t be the only deciding factor when choosing a web hosting company, looking for hosting plans that fit your budget is a good idea.
Compare different plans from each provider to get an idea of the features and support that come with each pricing tier. Check out benefits like free SSL certificates, free domain name registration, daily backups, CPU cores, storage space, bandwidth, and security measures. If you want a more sophisticated solution, look at NVMe storage and GPU hosting.
Many hosting firms provide discounts for the first year or month if you wish to try out their services. Many hosting firms, like Liquid Web, offer 30-day money-back guarantees on hosting packages.
When looking at hosting prices, be wary of deals that seem too good to be true. Plans with many features at very low prices often become scams. Seek out plans that provide excellent value instead.
Be careful when selecting a service that offers transparent pricing. Hidden fees and tiny print can increase your ultimate cost by hundreds or even thousands of dollars, particularly if you make long-term hosting commitments.
10. Check Scalability
Hosting scalability is crucial for any new or growing business. Choose a provider that offers scalable options at flexible pricing. You should be able to scale bandwidth, memory, and storage.
Let’s say your website experiences seasonal spikes in traffic. A scalable plan allows you to scale your bandwidth for a fee to accommodate additional traffic and scale it back when traffic drops.
11. Check reputation and reviews
With every hosting company claiming to be the best, it can be difficult to choose one based on the provider’s word of mouth alone. The best approach to check claims is to read customer testimonials.
Check trusted sites like Trustpilot for reviews. For industry-specific insights, check out the provider’s website for case studies.
In addition, you should talk with potential hosting companies and ask them specific questions regarding your requirements to evaluate their service quality.
