Tips for choosing a good shared hosting

TheBigBee

New Member
Such as normal users will select shared hosting packages for their first websites, i am on the same boat, I am searching for tips to choose a good shared hosting.

How to check and how to know it's a good shared hosting?
 

RDO Servers

Active Member
Such as normal users will select shared hosting packages for their first websites, i am on the same boat, I am searching for tips to choose a good shared hosting.

How to check and how to know it's a good shared hosting?


Hello TheBigBee,

There are a TON of shared hosting providers out there. Picking the right one can be a challenge. Here are a few things to consider:

Reviews
Do some looking online and search for reviews. If you don't find any, thats ok, but if you find a lot of negative reviews, be very cautious! Be careful with the web hosting reviews websites. Most of these are full of fake reviews and affiliate links!

Resources
What does the hosting account provide for you. There are all kinds of plans, amounts of space, bandwidth, etc. Remember, you can also move up a plan when needed. Don't feel like you have to get the most expensive, just in case. Also be cautions with hosts that provide "unlimited" resources, especially on drive space. There is no such thing as unlimited! Some hosts use this as a marketing play and will limit what you you can use by their TOS.

Overselling
A webserver only has a certain amount of space, processing power, and memory, etc. Many of the larger name hosts are knows to "oversell" their servers. i.e. If their server has 4TB of hard drive space, but the customers on that server total a allotted 8TB of space. This can result in other websites using too many of the available resources, which will degrade your websites performance. Try to find a host that does not oversell their servers.

Not all drives are created equal
SSD's or Solid State Drives are great. There have MUCH faster read/write speeds, and no moving parts (less prone to failure and run cooler). This is quickly becoming the industry standard, but they are much more expensive compared to a traditional hard drive. If performance is important to you, especially if your website uses databases, look for a host with SSD's

Support
Pretty much everyone advertises 24/7/365 support, but how good is the support and how long does it take them to respond and fix issues. If you really want to know how good a host is, I always suggest signing up for their lowest package. Play with it, mess it up, submit some support tickets. Chances are, if they take good care of a $2/mo customer, they will take really good care of all of their customers!

I hope this helps!
 

ulterios

Well-Known Member
The points that RDO pointed out are some good ones to consider.

One other thing that I would suggest is to do a Google, Bing, whatever search for the name of any hosting company that you are considering PLUS add in a negative word like "Scam", "Horrible", "Junk" or any other bad term that can possibly be used in relation to a hosting service.

There are bound to be some negative results for each hosting company as not everyone see's things that same but if yo get a large amount of results for the negative terms for the same hosting company then that's probably one tht you might want to avoid.

A few unhappy customers is understandable, lots of them means that there is more than likely something bad that the host just doesn't want to fix. ;)
 

Dean

Well-Known Member
One of the first things I would do is see if there are a lot of negative reviews for a host you are considering using. If there are many negative reviews, that can be a sign that their service is bad or their equipment is slow or outdated.

Next would be to see if you can find any good honest reviews of that host (good luck) with some details about their services. This is usually tough to figure out but you can try to check some of the top hosting blogs and see if there is any good information there.

After that, it's basically look through any information good or bad that you can find out about a potential host and see what it says. When that's done just analyze everything you find and make your best educated guess if you should try a particular host or check out another.

You can also post back here and ask opinions on a particular host that you are considering to see if there is anyone with any good info on them.

Hope this helps.

Cheers, Dean
 

Storm

Active Member
One thing that I will advise you to make sure of is the web hosts uptime policy and guarantee. I had a host that my site was down sometimes an hour or more each day. You don't want your site to have a lot of downtime because then people will get tired of it and go to someone else.
 

david smith

Member
While selecting a web hosting plan for shared hosting one needs to select the specification that is available for the hosting plan. Then according to the needs and requirement choose the plan that is the most appropriate. The support that is provided by the web host must be good as most of the users may be hosting their first website and may require help from the support team.
 

Ben

Active Member
The most useful tip I can give you is that after you have decided to buy web hosting from someone you only pay monthly at first until you see how good their hosting services are.

You don't want to pay for a long term and afterwards find out that they suck. :Agx:
 

JohnQ

Member
One good thing to do is to search google for any kind of recent problems or a lot of problems and bad things said about them. That's a good indicator that you might think about not using a certain host.
 

Gazoo

New Member
There have been some pretty good tips posted by the other members above but one thing that I didn't see mentioned was looking at long term growth needs.

When you buy a shared web hosting package many people look at what they need at that time without looking at what you may need in the future. If you buy a shared web hosting service that meets your current needs but it does not have the ability to scale up as you me need in the future then you may be forced to move to another host later on and nobody really likes having to move a site.

Take a look at your current needs and then try you best to figure in anything that might change in the future. If you are currently using say 1GB of storage for a site but you have plans for it to grow in the future then figure those potential needs into your minimum requirements.

Figuring in things like a growth in traffic, storage needs for more pages, blog posts and other potential needs can be a wise thing to do before locking into a hosting plan somewhere.

One last thing that I can't stress enough is that you look into any potential shared web hosting provider BEFORE you sign up with them. Make sure that any potential web host you think you may want to sign up for has a good reputation and in the customer service area especially. Like many other I have had to learn this from bad past experiences.
 
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