Website hosting companies sell their various plans using gobs of marketing copy. They all claim to be the best, to offer great customer service, and to have low prices. But, really, only one of them can be the best for you.

Digging through the marketing hype to find out which one is best can be difficult, so here are a few tips that will help you get hard data on website hosting companies.

Get A Network Report On Website Hosting Companies

Influential network monitoring company Netcraft compiles monthly and daily reports on various network statistics. One of the best of these is about hosting company response speed.

From Netcraft’s website you can find out which hosting site has the fastest first response time, total response time, and DNS response time. These are all important considerations when customers or anyone else wants to view your site right now.

Few considerations matter more in the website hosting market than speed. Fast speed points to the quality of the provider’s infrastructure as well as the skill of their network engineers and technicians. A hosting company with fast servers probably provides fast technical support and problem resolution too.

Website Hosting Price Per Year

Although I don’t recommend buying website hosting based solely on price, you won’t find any piece of hard data easier to locate than price.

But remember that a few extra dollars spent on quality website hosting can save you hassle and significantly increase the profitability of your website. You will find that the best companies cost only a few dollars more than the mediocre companies.

The Right And The Wrong Way To Track Uptime

Geeks have been tracking computer uptime for decades, but the general public only became aware of it with the recent web craze.

Uptime is how long a server has been consecutively connected to the Internet. Most website hosting companies today promise 99% uptime—but that’s actually not very good. Do the math: there are 168 hours in a week, 1% of that is over an hour—that means that your server could be down over an hour every week.

When comparing uptime, the hard data is how many decimal places of uptime guarantee the website hosting company offers. Is it 99%, 99.9%, or 99.99%?

The Ultimate Hard Data On Website Hosting

By far my favorite hard data on website hosting plans is the money-back guarantee period. That’s because you have to use a company to discover whether or not you like them.

Some companies don’t offer any guarantees. If you don’t sign a contract and only buy a month at a time, you don’t need a guarantee.

But other companies bill for the whole year at once (or even less often). For these providers, you want to note whether their trial periods are 15, 30, 45, or 60 days or longer.

Remember that, unless you’re a pro with a plan to build your website, it will probably take you at least two weeks to setup your website. That means a 15-day guarantee may not be sufficient to work out any kinks. Even a month might be too short if you have to deal with a full-time job in addition to your site building.

Conclusion

After you’ve collected your hard data, it should be much easier to decide which website hosting provider to choose.

There are many web hosting companies fighting for your business so it is important to thoroughly research before you buy. Finding the right WordPress web hosting is one of the most important steps to ensure your business success.