How to Choose Good Hosting

‘Choose good hosting’ is very important to everyone who wants to create websites. Are you creating a website and now need to choose a good hosting? If you are in doubt about which to hire, rest assured: you are not alone. Many people are faced with this question and are left without knowing where to start. In this article, we will explain how to choose good hosting in just 4 steps.

One is related to the hosting company, which needs to offer quality service and always available support. These are the minimum requirements because without them you run the risk of having your site unavailable when you need it most.

However, apart from the company, you also need to choose the hosting plan. That’s because each company offers different plans, for different types of site. Each plan has specific settings that can change a lot from one company to another.

How to choose a good hosting

Here’s a practical way to help you by explaining how to choose good hosting in just 4 steps. Come on?

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• 1. Size of your site.
• Small to medium – most websites.
• Large websites with lots of multimedia contents.
• 2. Evaluate the volume of access to the site.
• Moderate and uniform access.
• Many access or traffic peaks.
• 3. Consider the type of site you want to create (or have).
• Institutional site.
• Blog.
• Virtual store.
• 4. Evaluate the company and the hosting plan.
• About the hosting company.
• About the hosting plan.
• About the hosting price.

1. Size of your site

Is the website you own or are building small, medium or large? If you do not know how much space it occupies, think about the number of pages and contents. Is it a site up to 10 pages or much larger than that? How many images and videos are posted on the site?

This question is important because the size of your site will determine the disk space required in your hosting. Now we will show the ideal hosting for both cases.

Small to medium – most sites

Most sites fall into this category because they occupy a relatively small disk space compared to what is available on the market.  If your site or your blog occupies a space of up to 100 GB, (shared) web hosting will meet your needs. This is the most popular hosting and caters to the vast majority of websites on the internet, such as ours, for example. In addition, it is the cheapest, with plans between $ 5 and $ 20 monthly.

To give you an idea of how much this space means, 100 GB has more than one million 100 KB images. Of course, a website is not just made of images and not all of them will have that size, but you can show what can be done with such a disk space. You also need to search, since the accommodations also vary in disk space. The best-known offer between 10 GB and 100 GB and may or may not share the space with other features such as email and database.

Sites created in WordPress can also count on platform-specific hosting plans.

Large sites – with lots of multimedia content

In this category are some specific sites, which occupy a disk space greater than 100 GB. Content portals that publish daily multimedia content and heavy websites with large volumes of photos, videos and audios are good examples. In cases like these, it is advisable to hire a more robust plan such as a VPS server, cloud or dedicated server.

There are some cases where “small” websites and blogs have not behaved in shared hosting. This can happen for some reasons, being the most common when the site owner publishes a large number of images without first optimizing them. This practice can cause disk space to be used and migrate hosting. Without counting the performance of the site, it will certainly be affected.

If the site has not yet been published, you can start with an ordinary website hosting and expect your site to grow to migrate to a more robust plan. After all, this may take some time and you will save a lot in the meantime since the values of the lodging vary a lot.

2. Evaluate the volume of access to the site

Does your site get a lot of visitors? Evaluating the traffic is important because of the transfer offered by the hosting plans. In addition, each time a page loads, it uses some of the hosting server’s features.

Moderate and uniform access

It is very difficult to establish access limits for each type of hosting, as this varies greatly depending on the site and the contracted plan. How to Choose Good Hosting What is important to understand is that access behaviour is more important than the monthly access volume. If your site is similar to ours (or even simpler) and receives up to 50,000 visits throughout the month (evenly), shared hosting may suffice. Remembering that this will also depend on the plan and the contracted company.

It is also important to take into account the type of website you have since each access uses some of the resources of the server. A site with many videos or images will certainly consume more server resources than a site that uses more text. Optimizing the site, in turn, avoids overhead on the hosting server and allows you to use a shared hosting, even with a greater number of hits.

Many access or traffic peaks

A site with thousands of hits a day can quickly consume the resources of a common hosting plan and make the site stay off the air. This scenario is quite common on sites that have a large audience or that have irregular access behaviour with peaks of traffic. Popular blogs and virtual stores are examples of sites with this type of traffic.

When a blogger publishes new content on the social network, the blog receives a flood of new visits and can become unavailable if it is hosted on a plan that will not stand still. In the case of virtual stores, promotions also generate a high flow of concurrent access, which may not be supported by a shared hosting. In cases like this, the recommendation is to hire a Cloud hosting or a dedicated server.

3. Consider the type of site you want to create (or have)

Institutional site

Most sites fit into this category. If the site you own (or plan to create) is from a local business, a small business or even a personal website, shared hosting is usually sufficient. This type of site does not usually take up too much disk space, nor does it reach a very high volume of visitors, so it fits well in this type of hosting. Of course, every rule has exceptions. If your business shows up on a TV show and hundreds of people visit your site that minute, it’s likely to be off the air.

Blog

Blogs can also generally use a shared hosting. In this case, the main difference is perhaps the potential for it to have peaks of traffic, common to blogs of personalities. If your blog has regular traffic, even if it is heavily visited, it might be supported on a shared hosting. However, if your access volume is high (over 5,000 visits per day) or you have traffic peaks, you probably need a cloud hosting or a dedicated server. There are even blogging situations that do not have such a large number of hits but have a very heavy theme and non-optimized images. Remember, if this happens, you may be forced to change plans.

Virtual store

If you have an e-commerce site, your hosting needs to provide the SSL security protocol, which ensures the security of the customer’s data through encryption on every information sent and received. Not offering this kind of security is putting your customers’ information at risk, which could be exposed to malicious people.

The ideal hosting plan varies by store size. If it’s a small e-commerce, with few pages and products, a shared site hosting that offers SSL will meet your needs. Choose Good Hosting On the other hand, medium and large virtual stores demand more robust plans, such as cloud and dedicated server. In both cases, you need to be aware of traffic peaks, which can cause your online store to go off the air.

It is also common to use the ready-made virtual stores, which already come with the included hosting. In this case, just choose the plan that fits your needs. Usually, they vary according to the number of products and monthly visits.

4. Evaluate the company and the hosting plan

By answering the first three questions, you are now able to choose the right hosting plan for your site.

Now that you already know what type of hosting your site needs, it’s time to evaluate the companies and plans. Here are important points when choosing good hosting:

About the hosting company

• Reputation in the market – what is the opinion of customers in Reclame Aqui and in social networks? Is it a known company?
• Support – what channels and hours of service? Is it supported in Portuguese?
• Management – is the control panel in Portuguese?
• Guarantees – Does the company offer refund if the customer is dissatisfied?
• Uptime – Does the company offer a server availability guarantee of over 99.5%?

About the hosting plan

• Disk space – what disk space is offered in the plan?
• Data transfer – what is the traffic limit of the plan?
• Platform – is Linux or Windows hosting offered?
• E-mail – how many e-mail accounts and what storage space in each account?
• Extras – is a site builder offered? Is SSL certificate free?

And the price, should I take into account?

The price issue should not be decisive in your choice of hosting, but it may help you. How to Choose Good Hosting There are hosting companies with very competitive prices, which offer a service of great quality. This happens because the price is related to several factors, such as the location of the server.

When analyzing the price of a hosting, consider what is being offered and what are its guarantees. If it is a good hosting and the price is within the expected, then there is a good option.

I hope the tips have helped you choose good hosting. To the next!