How do you choose a good web hosting provider? Well it’s no easy task, there are thousands of web hosting providers and each have different SLAs, different pricing packages and also are located in different geographies. Various aspects have to be considered including of course service and pricing.
Points to consider:
Bandwidth – Unlimited or fixed amount?
Disk space – How much space does your website require?
Databases – Do you plan to have any?
Domains – Do you have multiple? Do you intend to grow?
SSL – Do you need secure sessions?
There are various reviews out there to identify the best hosting provider. A simple googlesearch brings out tons of reviews which we always suggest you follow before purchasing a new plan or switching providers. You might also opt to go for a local provider, which is also good especially if you website is targeted for a particular region only.
But once you choose a hosting provider, can you really trust them? Can you trust that no mistakes are done from your end or from somebody else. A simple update gone wrong can bring up a whole website down.
With monitoring software like Netumo you can easily be notified if something is wrong. Netumo can also clearly point out to you the response time. Web hosting companies normally have multiple websites being hosted on the same server. Unoptimized code and a lot of visitors to some other site on the same server can cause problems to your website effecting you negatively.
Why do you need somebody to monitor?
Response Time Graph
Sites go down either because the hosting provider does something wrong or else because something goes wrong in the site. If it’s the first you would want to open a support ticket with the hosting provider and check on what’s the ETA to solve it. In the latter you need to be notified immediately because you need to fix it, as nobody else will.
With the aid of a monitoring solution you can easily identify the server flaws and try to overcome any future issues. Response time graphs are usually plotted with date/time on the x-axis and time taken (normally in milliseconds) to serve the requests on the y-axis. Ideally response times should be in the seconds region, less than 3 seconds.
If such providers offer a trial period then take the opportunity and whist trying it out monitor them to check what their uptime and downtime is.
The conclusion here is that reviews can only help you in determine a good hosting provider but ultimately monitoring can prove that he truly is a good provider.
