Choosing a hosting provider can be a daunting task, especially if you are new to running a website and if you are not sure of what kind of hosting your website needs.

Selecting a wrong hosting provider can turn out to be a quite expensive mistake, where you end up paying for features you do not use, and compromise on ones you actually need.

Here are important points you should consider before deciding what kind of hosting solution is right for your website.

Know your hosting needs:

Often web-developers underestimate or overestimate their hosting needs. This eventually leads to overall underperformance of their websites.

Disk space and bandwidth decides the speed and performance of the website being built. Bandwidth depends on your web page size , the number of visitors to your website and number of pages they visit. Depending on these parameters one should make the decision on which hosting provider or plan best suits your need.

For example an average page size of 50KB, 20,000 visitors per month, and 5 pages per visitor your website will need about 5000MB, or 5GB, of bandwidth per month. Note that 20,000 visitors per month equates to approximately 667 visitors per day. This is a number even most large websites cannot achieve.

If you are just launching your website, chances are you will not need a huge amount of space or a huge amount of bandwidth. For a small sites, shared hosting is the recommended solution , it is cheap, easy to maintain and sufficient. Though, as your site grows moving to a dedicated hosting or VPS might be required.

One of the best ways to determine the bandwidth needed is to draw a website “product lifecycle” and estimate the amount of disk space & bandwidth with respect to time.

Location of the host:

The location of the host should be nearer to the target audience of the visitors for faster access. For instance your target audience are based out of India it is advisable to opt for a service based out of india or a provider with servers in India.

When it comes to loading speeds distance matters, for instance a website hosted on a server in India and being accessed by a customers in US the load speed would be much lower than a website hosted in US.

We recommend plugging in into a CDN network, which allows your website to have multiple copies across countries.

Kitsune comes auto-integrated with Amazon Cloudfront, one of the best CDNs in the market today.

Server Reliability:

Amazon once experienced two hours of downtime and that single outage cost the company $3.48 million.

For an online or ecommerce business, Downtime is not an option ; A generous up-time guarantee backed by reasonable terms of service usually is an indicator of a good hosting provider.

Though we do suggest, conducting real-life performance tests of your hosting provider to test the up-time, the outages and the average response time by subscribing to the free trial of various web hosts, before choosing one permanently.

Most hosting providers allow you to have a minimalist access either free or paid trial of their services. We suggest making good use of the same.

Kitsune guarantees 98% uptime as it hosts websites on Amazon S3, a serverless architecture.

Search Engine Ranking Pages:

40% of people abandon a website if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load.

Along with bandwidth the actual size of the content on the the web page greatly affects load speeds though in most cases we wouldn’t be able to remove most of the essential content (images, videos, CSS) from the page.

Gzip can help you compress your files/content allowing for faster network transfers. This allows your servers to provide smaller size files , which load faster.

Our Suggestion: Make sure you either use Gzip or your hosting provider helps you with it.

Technical Support:

Website are increasingly becoming the bloodline for most companies, making it essential that any issues that may arise on the website is dealt with swiftly. A solid support structure would always be a +2 for the hosting provider.

Customer Reviews:

Checking the reviews and testimonials of each hosting provider you consider, will give you an insight on all the unexpected limitations and abilities of the hosting providers.

Switching Webhosts:

Before making a move to new webhost from the existing one, you need to consider few things for efficient transformation:

  • Your new web host should offer the similar or more storage capabilities to handle your current website storage requirements.
  • Your new host operating system should be compatible with the current OS of the host.
  • If you are using any scripts on your website, make sure that the new hosts supports all of the scripts.

Once you have your website transferred to your new host, pre-activate your account services and make sure your website looks and functions properly.

To give you a heads up on few hosting providers, WP Engine is recommended only if you have a WordPress site and have decent traffic to that site, whereas BlueHost is known for its for its cheap price and shared hosting.

While Cloudflare is expensive, it’s Pro Plan provides high security for both DDoS attacks and SQL injection whereas for Hostgator, site performance has not always been best but it’s Business Plan provides unlimited bandwidth and unlimited storage.

So much depends on your individual website’s needs and wants. Is guaranteed up-time most important? Are you looking for an affordable pricing? Is security the priority? Depending on how you answer questions like these, the idea of which host is best can change.

It’s wise to spend some time listing out your priorities and figuring out which hosting provider suits your needs.

Team Kitsune

Written by

Making existing websites faster and enabling developers to create faster websites http://getkitsune.com/

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