What to take into account when choosing a Web Hosting service

One of the biggest, yet most often overlooked, decisions one has to make when putting a personal or business website online is the choice of Web Hosting provider. Many opt to just go for the one that seems to be cheaper, unaware of the limitations, problems and/or hidden costs they’ll bump into along the way – and often find their web platform running slow, having trouble keeping up with more than a handful of users or just downright breaking under any strain.

Therefore, you should know what you need to take into account when choosing a Web Hosting service to suit your needs. Be sure to ask yourself (and the service) the following questions before making a final decision:

What kind of support does the Web Hosting service provide?

One of the main things to look out for when choosing a Web Hosting service is customer support. Many big services’ cheapest options offer no support whatsoever; you are essentially dumped into a shared server and have to fend for yourself. Have any problems setting up or managing your website? Tough luck, you’re on your own!

On the other hand, you have premium solutions like managed hosting, usually for WordPress websites, where you get top-of-the-line support but, like the name implies, pay a pretty penny for the exclusivity. Great for users with deep pockets, not so much for the entrepreneur or hobbyist just starting out their digital business!

The best choice is to find a Web Hosting service that offers great support without breaking your bank in the process. Neoxea, for example, has 24/7 support, with the first reply to any support ticket coming within 10 minutes. Couple that with over a decade of experience with Web Hosting, especially WordPress, and you can see why it’s the top pick for so many discerning customers!

What limits does the Web Hosting service impose?

Many, if not most, Web Hosting services set up tiered plans with hard limits on the traffic that can come to your website, which often seem negligible at first and you think you’re never going to reach them, until you suddenly find yourself hitting that wall very quickly and are pretty much forced to upgrade immediately, upping your costs immensely out of nowhere.

That’s why you should look for a cost-effective solution that doesn’t limit you on the volume of traffic your website can get, because you can’t control how much traffic actually heads to your website and, hey, isn’t the whole point to get more people to visit?

On the other hand, space is rarely a problem for most modern websites, so anything above 10 GB storage should do for most cases (even better if it’s faster SSD storage), so you don’t have to worry too much about that. So if some Web Hosting platform offers something like 100 GB of storage but will only grant you about 2,500 visits a month, beware!

What kind of server stack does the Web Hosting service offer?

Most Web Hosting platforms are still based on the old LAMP server stack—that is, the software that the server runs on, with “LAMP” being an acronym of Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with old classics, this is hardly the fastest stack nowadays, with LiteSpeed Web Server in particular making waves thanks to its lightning-fast performance.

If you want a fast website (and if you want the best chances of ranking on Google, you do), you need to make sure the Web Hosting service you choose offers the most modern and speed-optimized server stack.

What is the Web Hosting service’s uptime rate?

Uptime means the time your website is actually up and running online—or, looking at it another way, the uptime rate is the percentage of time your site isn’t randomly down due to some service shortage!

There’s no point to having a website if people can’t visit it, especially if it’s an E-commerce website and your livelihood depends on it, which is why uptime is such an important yet hard to measure factor.

All Web Hosting services always promise near-faultless uptime, but, unfortunately, the only way you can really be sure is by being their client. Look online for honest (i.e. not sponsored) opinions from clients of Web Hosting services in regards to uptime to ensure you make the right choice and don’t find yourself paying for hosting that doesn’t actually work most of the time.

Are the web servers optimized for speed?

We’ve already touched on this briefly, but speed is one of the most important factors for both users and search engines (which bring more users, of course). After all, nobody likes to wait for a page to load, right?

Many Web Hosting services either offer slow shared hosting or dedicated servers that cost an arm and a leg and still may not be fully optimized for speed. You’ll want to be on the lookout for servers running on LiteSpeed, especially if you have a WordPress or WooCommerce website, to make sure you get really excellent performance. Unfortunately, due to how groundbreaking LiteSpeed is, a lot of Web Hosting options that offer it are also fairly expensive—if you want the best, they’ll charge you for it—but there is another way.

Neoxea: the best choice for personal and business websites

There’s a reason why we can comfortably talk about the dos and don’ts of Web Hosting: because Neoxea offers the very best in performant Web Hosting and top-of-the-line support that’s actually there for you for a fraction of the cost. There’s no secret or no hidden costs; it’s just our philosophy to make sure your Web presence has the server it deserves without gouging your wallet with insane prices.

If you’re interested, reach out to our team and find out what we can do for you.