How to Choose an Affordable & Reliable Web Host

Many webmasters, especially personal website owners, always look around for web hosts that offer services which are both affordable and reliable so that they can get high performance with the minimum costs. However, it is not an easy task because being affordable sometimes means scams while being reliable may be the result of large expenses.

We are here because we want to help. Based on years of hosting experience, we have worked out several steps which need to accomplish if you are in the way of searching for an affordable and reliable web host. We hope that this guide is helpful.

1. Choose the proper price but not the lowest.

It is not hard to find web hosts offering cheap services with the price lower than $2/mo or even $1/mo, but are they really reliable choices? Probably not, because usually you only get what you pay for. Such kind of companies may outsource the technical support due to the limitation on budget or deliver bad performance because of the lack of high quality hardware.

If you want to run a small personal website with simple pages and posts, a service priced around $4/mo is enough, but if you plan to build a blog with rich content, an image site or an e-commerce site, you need a more powerful service which is usually priced more than $5/mo. Besides, a company with a long refund-period should be more reliable.

2. Know the company reputation from customer reviews.

When looking for a reliable web hosting provider, you are expecting to go with a company that has a high reputation (at least not a scam). At this time, what you need are the comments and feedbacks from real customers who know the company’s advantages and drawbacks.

If you feel time-consuming to do this, you can have a look on this best 10 award, listing the award-winning hosting companies that have a large user base all over the world with few complaints.

3. Search for the information about the company’s facilities.

The quality of a company’s data center and network facilities has a large impact on the performance of the service it offers. Therefore, you have to do some reading or searching to get information like the brand of the servers, the locations of data centers, the bandwidth providers, the quality of the networks, the data center power supply, and so on.

If a web host is reliable and powerful enough, it should have some or all of these equipment: out-of-the-box dual quad processor servers, uninterrupted power supply, diesel generators, first-rate network and routers from top companies like Cisco and Brocade, and a full security system. 24×7 server and network monitoring is also necessary in case that unexpected issues happen.

4. Check out the uptime guarantee and real records.

The amount of uptime decides that how long your website is accessible, so it can show the reliability of a company clearly. Nowadays, most web hosts have a guarantee of 99.9% server/network uptime. This guarantee is not an evidence of excellence, but if a web host doesn’t give it to customers, you’d better think twice before signing up.

Note that a guarantee is not enough because many companies may fail to fulfill it in practice. That is why you should find the real uptime records. Just search in Google or visit some professional review sites like HostingReview360 to browse the statistics in the past year or half a year.

5. Analyze the web hosting features.

A web host that is both reliable and affordable usually offers sufficient server resources including unlimited disk space and bandwidth, tons of easy-to-use tools like cPanel control panel, auto script installer and website builder, and many additional features.

If you have some particular requirements on features – Cron Job, for example, – you should go through the feature list carefully to make sure that your demands are fully met. In addition, a company providing free backup service is better as this adds an extra layer to the website data security.

6. Make sure of the quality of technical support.

This is a big point because you will desire to get a real person to help on the phone or live chat when your website goes down for unknown reasons or you meet troubles in managing the site. Besides, the person on the other side should know what is wrong and how to get it fixed.

To check whether the support is good, find out answers for the following questions. What channels does the company offer for you to contact a staff – toll-free phone, live chat, email or some others? Is the support available 24×7? Does the company outsource customer service? Is the response prompt? If the answers for all the questions above are positive, the company is worth trying.