Looking for a Web Host: Know these things first!

Business-related decisions are crucial because it impact the business results. Once the decision is made there is huge investments of money as well as efforts. Selecting the right web hosting provider is one of such crucial business decisions. It is quite a daunting task and it becomes even more difficult when all the data centers are claiming to deliver better services than one-another. Each provider is making big promises to provide unlimited bandwidth, unlimited disk space etc., the users get bewildered and then it becomes difficult to arrive at a decision.

However, if you have clear IT goals and if you follow a well-planned approach, selecting the right web host will become easy for you. There are few important things that you must ask the web hosts. Also, explain them about your business specific web needs.

Points to consider before buying a web hostr
Clear goals vs. Running in Circles: This is the first thing you need to understand. Before you start hunting for web host services, you should first decide your business IT goals and what you expect from the service providers. Do a little homework. Remember Web hosts may suggest you hundreds of things but only if your goals are clear, you will be able to judge which will work best for you.

Affordable vs. cheapest: When your budget is small, you tend to get attracted towards the ‘cheapest’ provider. You almost feel that you got your deal. But put your second thoughts to it because cheapest may even mean bad quality. When comparing prices of web hosts, don’t just look at the price column but also see what all services are being offered in the similar price range.

99.9% vs. 99.95% vs. 99.99% uptime SLA: These are the levels of server uptime guarantee by the data centers. You may even come across few VPS server and cloud providers who offers 100% server uptime which is an exaggeration. Let us understand the mathematical logic of uptime levels.

Server Uptime Availability
99.90 %
99.95 %
99.99 %

Downtime per month
43.2 minutes
21.56 minutes
4.32 minutes

Downtime is not always about failures, most of the times it is related to the time involved in the scheduled maintenance of servers too. Choose data centers with 99.99% of server uptime guarantee.

Honest deal vs. fake promises: Many may claim impossible advantages with flashy adjectives, but the reality may be different. To avoid getting into such traps, you should check the clientele of the web hosts, read the testimonials and reviews of the cloud providers. These all will give you a fair idea about their quality deliverance.