Yeah. I know. There are tens and thousands of them out there, and you can’t choose one. Everyone gets indecisive about these things, so it’s all good. I will write today about the things you will want to take into account when buying yourself a hosting service based on price / technical requirements / performance, and all the other factors i can think of. And if you are too decisive yourself, don’t rush honey. Making a bad investment is not fun at all, trust me. Been there. All too excited to buy the cheap domain, only to find out it does not support any scripting language (LOL).
So, the following are the decisive factors in buying a domain with hosting:
- Price
- Performance
- Availability
- Length of the time of that Package
- Customer Support
- Features
It is the rule of capitalism that price drops with demand, as the competitors are trying to offer a lower price, or extra features to be chosen before you. GoDaddy has subscriptions as low as 2.99$ month for personal websites and HostGator offers 1 year of subscription for 29.99$!!! These people are getting out of their minds in the rat race, and it’s your responsibility to profit from this fierce competition, as the consumer. Now let us define what we mean by the factors i listed above.
Price:
This is the one we all pay attention the most. It is our nature to desire the best things, by giving the least we can in turn, and this applies to prices. Because of the hosting service count explosion, prices have become very competitive. A popular hosting service will be able to offer 2 dollars per month for a domain and hosting space. Domains and hosting are becoming cheap commodities and it might actually be a danger for the web. But the user will not usually care. You should expect to pay a bigger amount monthly if your requirements are big though (Such as a web application in a custom framework with big space). There is a package for every budget out there. The trick is to find the perfect one in the sea of hosting companies without having to search much for it.
Performance:
Performance in web servers means the capability of servers to serve as many as clients in the shortest amount of time possible. Servers employ multiple hard drives, memory configurations, extra processors, and lighter installations (such as operating systems that are lower on resources as Linux and FreeBSD Servers do), building clusters, moving things to the cloud, etc. When you go to the website of the hosting service your attention is on, kindly ask them what operating systems and configuration they employ. If you are technically knowledgeable, you will be able to make good assumptions about how big on performance will your chosen installation be, whatever the package contains.
On the other side, you may want to trade some of performance to lower the price if you are not expecting that many visitors. If you have, say, 50 visitors daily, don’t go out of your way to buy a 12$ month package of a hosting that can handle 50.000 daily. That’s an overkill and it will hurt your pockets in the long term.
Availability:
Downtime can be a real pain in the ass at times where you receive your most clients ( 12 : 00 AM – 5 : 00 AM usually ). You must choose a server that suits your up time needs, and will serve your clients even at 4 AM (it’s ok if you are down for maintenance, but don’t keep your users on hold for more than an hour, and provide time fame of the down time so you do not lose clients over a stupid maintenance ) .
Length of the Package Time:
The wisest decision here is to find the host that offers the longest time while providing the lowest price. If one host gives you 1 year for 3 dollars a month, and the other 4 dollars a month for 6 months, i will not even continue to mention it. There is no reason to choose the latter except if you have some special requirements such as bigger performance or much more hosting space than the first package on the 4 dollars a month package. By buying the former, you will encourage the other company to lower their price for their package and lengthen their time frame for that low price too! Both you and your hosting provider win by making it easier for the every day guy to buy some hosting space for himself.
Customer Support:
The best case in here is to choose a hosting company that provides live chat support 24 / 7. This is a clear proof that the company is serious and successful , as well as you will get your problems on the domain much faster fixed than an e mail that you will have to wait at least an half hour to be solved. Choose a company that responds to your queries and offers you free support for the package you are buying. This is the biggest positive investment you will make in order to have your visitors and clients access your web space smoothly and without problems, not risking to lose them to other competitors who have customer support at their availability.
Features:
Also, you will want to check for features that you will need or like when desiring to choose the best hosting provider. One of the nicest and newest are Amazon C2. The other one is one that offers rapid web application development services where with a simple click, you can create a total new web application, using Ruby, PHP, Python, Django etc. There are hosting companies that offer their customers an online IDE where they can write their code straight away such as Cloud9.