4 Deadly Mistakes to Avoid when Choosing a Web Hosting

With the revolution of internet, the presence of online business companies are increasing over time and not to mention that the competition in the market is gradually increasing as well. In order to establish a good presence in the market, business companies hire PHP developers or programmers to develop a highly secure and an innovative web application.

However, not every small business has a budget to hire professional developers. Small companies decide to develop their own websites and if you are also one of these companies who are earning a decent revenue by offering online products, then before selecting a web hosting for your website you should investigate the web hosting service or your website would go down without a prior warning or a signal.

Finding a suitable hosting is a complicated task specially if you are not familiar with web hosting.   But when deciding for a hosting company you should avoid the following critical mistakes, so that you could save your website from a breakdown.

Deciding for a Free Hosting

The option for a free hosting certainly seems appropriate for companies with minimal revenue, but the downside in using a free hosting is significantly greater. Free hosting always provide a shared server and since countless number of small business companies usually aim for a free web hosting, then it means that you are sharing the space and the resources with numerous websites. The result of a shared web hosting could be a drop in your website performance over time.

Following are some of the limitations of using a free hosting

1. You will experience  a slowdown in your website loading speed
2. Slow loading speed affect SEO and Google would demote you in Search Engine Results Page (SERP) because of slow loading speed
3. You would experience a significant drop in your website traffic
4. Your website would be bombarded with third-party advertisements

Most of the paid hosting seem expensive, but you can search for a cheap web hosting that would provide an excellent user experience. In order to increase your brand sales, you need to sacrifice some of your revenues. It might seem like a tough decision at first, but it would pay off after a long run.

Ignoring Customer Reviews

Finding a web hosting is easier, but finding a good web hosting for your website is a difficult task. But before selecting a hosting, you can check the customer reviews to assess the quality of the web hosting company. Not all the hosting services provide a good service, some might have security issues, complaints about customer support or slow performance.

First, create a list of available web hosting, then exclude the ones with a red flag in order to find a suitable hosting. But watch out for the fake reviews, some websites even integrate fake reviews in their website to increase their sales.

If you want to check the reviews for a web hosting, then you should start by reading the reviews written by the technical writers, because since they have the first-hand experience in testing the web hosting, they would be able to guide you towards finding a more suitable web hosting.

Not Testing Customer Support

Variety of hosting companies would promise you to provide 24/7 customer support via email or chat, but when your website would go down out of the blue, then you might not receive the response from the companies even after days of complaining. You would suffer a loss of product sales during the time period your website would be broken and if your website would be unavailable for too long, then even your potential customers might end up finding an alternative website. Customer service is useless if the hosting company provide a delayed response.

You can use the following two methods to check if the company is providing good customer support or a hosting:

1. Check the message boards to assess the time duration of the response for a particular hosting company
2. Check the customer reviews to determine the type of customer support provided by the company

Selecting a New Hosting Company

If your company is new then you might search for a cheap or a free web hosting and you might come across discount packages of the hosting companies, where they would offer you unlimited space. The unlimited space and cheap hosting might convince you to buy the new web hosting.

But the hosting companies that provide unlimited space would eventually run out of space after 6 to 12 months and then they would shut down the web hosting. If you still want to choose a new hosting company, then make sure that you select the one that has survived for at least ten years, because if a company can survive for that long then they are bound to provide a good hosting service to the users.

It is certainly difficult to find a good hosting company, but you can check the customer’s review and testimonials to decide if a company is providing a good hosting. You can also contact the companies and ask a few questions to analyze the quality of their service, but if the hosting company hesitate to provide you the answers that you are looking for, then you should move on to another hosting company in order to find a more suitable alternative.