When planning to set up a site, a lot of things has to be taken care of. And the most important one is the hosting provider where you will be hosting your site. Hosting is like a house to all your websites. Like how we hunt a couple of new houses and select a one that seems best before moving on, the same way we have to look for the several hosting providers, what they have to offer, and what will be the best one where you will be planning to host your site on.
As we understand choosing the best web hosting provider among many is a daunting task, we’ll try to help you out in this process and will tell you what factors or things should be considered before choosing the one. Keep reading and you will find the ultimate ONE!
Here, we have listed our top picks below that will help you get started. You can individually check them out and select the one that best suits your need.
Best Web Hosting Providers
Here are our best handpicked web hosting providers that you should check out:
Bluehost (www.bluehost.in)
+ FREE domain and SSL certificate
+ 1-click WordPress installs
+ Unlimited traffic and in-house support 24/7
+ Usually ₹399/month, but our visitors get 45% off!
+ Industry-leading hardware and uptime
SiteGround (www.siteground.com)
+ Managed WordPress & Out-of-the-box Caching
+ FREE SSL, daily backups, CDN, and email
+ 24/7 expert support service
+ Enhanced Security & unlimited databases
+ 30-Days Money-Back Guarantee
HostGator (www.hostgator.in)
+ Get 40% off by buying 36 months upfront
+ Unmetered disk space & bandwidth
+ Unlimited emails & FREE SSL certificate
+ One-click application installer & Spam protection
+ Free 1-year domain on select plans
A2Hosting (www.a2hosting.com)
+ SSDs and TurboServer with 20x faster page loads
+ Host unlimited websites and FREE site migration
+ 40% faster CPU performance & 3x faster read-write speed
+ Comes with Pre-installed OPcache and Memcached caching
+ FREE HackScan with restore ability
InMotionHosting (www.inmotionhosting.com)
+ FREE SSL certificate and unlimited bandwidth
+ SSH Access & Safe Application Roll-back
+ Features a FREE BoldGrid website builder
+ 90 Day Full Money-Back Guarantee
+ 24/7/365 US-based Support
NameCheap (namecheap.com)
+ Save around 59% off by buying 24 months upfront
+ FREE SSL certificate and unlimited bandwidth
+ Auto backup & Cloud-storage
+ Free domain name & privacy protection
+ Host a minimum of 3 websites in a single plan
Types of Hosting
There are two types of hosting that you should be aware of initially when starting things out.
- Self-hosting Or Shared-hosting
- Free hosting
Self-hosting Or Shared hosting
Self-hosting or Shared hosting in the Internet world means that you’re paying a company to host your domain plus the files associated with it so that other people on the internet would have access to your website.
Initially, your website won’t make any heavy computations on your hosting provider servers so you can host your site on a relatively low-cost shared server. Hosting providers like Bluehost, GoDaddy, HostGator, and many others offer cheap hosting plans exactly for such purposes.
But if you are wondering why they offer such cheap hosting plans? It is because they just provide you part of server resources to you. And like this many other sites would be hosted on a single shared server sharing the same resources yet isolated from each other.
Such plans offer you a part of computing resources like webspace, amount of RAM, CPU power. But choosing a shared hosting for your site isn’t always a good idea. I tell you why… so even if your site doesn’t make any heavy demands in terms of resources, your site still might be available to your users due to some other site on the same server making heavy demands.
But this isn’t always the case. We still recommend you to go with the shared web hosting plan which you will see why in a few minutes as you continue reading.
Free hosting
From the name itself you can assume that it allows you to host your site for free. Isn’t it great? No. Because nothing comes for free. First of all, your site will be hosted on a subdomain of the free hosting provider.
Apart from that, there are several disadvantages when considering free-hosting:
- Free plans add up several advertisements to your site.
- The servers won’t be stable and you might face up downtime for the majority of the time.
- Limited use of plug-ins and themes.
- You might end up losing your site if they feel you’ve violated any of their rules.
- The support is poor or nonexistent. You don’t want your site to be down for a longer period.
What To Look For In a Web Host?
While considering a particular host there are several other things that you should be aware of apart from what the plan has to offer. As these are the things that most of the hosting companies don’t mention on their website. Let’s have a look at these:
- Price: When looking at the price of any plan, check out what the asterisk or pricing details say. Usually, the price you see is only for a limited time period and thereafter the renewal charges would be much higher.
- Uptime & Downtime Statistics: Look for the reviews of the host you are considering. The uptime and downtime play a very important role while picking up any host. You don’t want your website to be down most of the time. Do you?
- Support: If you run into some issues you want the support to handle from there and get it fixed ASAP… right? But for that, you should make sure what kind of support the host offers – 24*7 chat or email or both. Chat support is really a good way to get your issue resolved instantly. But if the agent is not available at the moment they sending an email can be of help. But if the host offers only emails support then there are fewer chances of getting your issue resolved quickly.
- CPU Cycles & Throttling: They both matter the most when you are picking up any hosting plan. The problem with a shared hosting server is that if one website starts using a server very intensively then the server resources are stretched to the max and for this reason, the other sites have to suffer. CPU cycles tell how much of the processor’s time your site is taking up while working on a process. Throttling is when you are taking up more of the server resources than the hosting provider thinks you should and automatically throttles or slows your site down just to make sure all the other sites on the same server are operating within capacity.
The above factors will decide how strong your host is and whether it is worth hosting your site on a host that lacks these features.
Conclusion
One has to research a lot while considering the best web hosting provider. Several factors like price, uptime & downtime statistics, type of support, CPU cycles & throttling, etc. determine how strong your web host is and what type of quality and performance they can provide. These are the several things that you should look for in a web host.
We recommend you consider a low shared web hosting plan initially, try it out for a year, and gradually upgrade it to a higher plan if the plan doesn’t suit your needs. But it is always better than free hosting.
Let us know what you look for in a web host while choosing your ultimate web host.
If you have purchased a hosting plan for yourself and wondering what next then hop into another article on How You Can Get Started with WordPress.
