No really, I’m asking!
My web host
My first (and current) web host, NearlyFreeSpeech.net, was recommended to me by my husband when I moved from Blogger to WordPress. I didn’t really know anything about servers and hosting at the time, so I trusted my software engineer’s advice implicitly. He didn’t steer me wrong; I’ve found NSF.net to be reliable, affordable and communicable when there are any server problems.
NFS.net is rather different to many other server setups: they run their servers on a custom BSD (UNIX based) operating system and they have a pre-paid account system where they charge for usage (storage, bandwidth, and MySQL processes). This might seem foreign to many of you, and you might balk at the thought of paying for usage when you can pay month for “unlimited” storage and bandwidth, but actually, for small–medium sites NFS.net is incredibly affordable (my first year on there probably only cost about $16, and my second year was about $43). I quite like their simple user interface as well. It is a lot less cluttered and complicated than most cpanels.
NFS.net might not be suitable for everyone though, since sometimes it can be a bit more hands-on. You need to access your files vis FTP or SSH, there’s no built in file editor (there is phpMyAdmin for your databases though). Also, their faster server type uses PHP safe mode, which not all WordPress plugins will play nicely with. PHP safe mode is being deprecated and I have word that NFS.net is working on solutions for fast and secure servers without it, but it did prompt me to look around at other hosts.
What’s important to you?
So, what’s important to you in a web host?
Obviously, when running WordPress, PHP and MySQL are crucial. One of the things that I find valuable is control and access of my files, including SSH access and the ability to change permissions on files. SSH access is also handy as one of the ways to access MySQL apart from phpMyAdmin, using Sequel Pro.
I guess price, security and support and probably all gimmes too, but what else?
What about these words “unlimited”? Are they really unlimited? Are they over-selling? Are they talking themselves up? What if I decide to use my server as a backup for my whole computer, will it still be unlimited?
How do you find web hosting?
Web Hosting Search was recently brought to my attention. Web Hosting Search has quite a lot of resources, reviews and articles to help you find and compare web hosts.
Have you ever wondered what the difference between Windows and Linux hosting is, how that relates to cost and what it means for you as a website manager? Or what the many different types of hosting services are? I was wondering the latter when I came across Chris Pearson’s web host recommendations (and actually, I’m still wondering how it’s possible to have VPS and cloud hosting at the same time…).
One of the best things about Web Hosting Search (I think) are the reviews. You can try to search Google for reviews on web hosts, or ask Twitter, but I’ve found that you get a bunch of one-off reviews and recommendations with no statistical significance at all and you’re no better equipped to make a decision than you were before. Web Hosting Search has quite a balanced range of reviews, and I think the reviews do a good job of identifying particular issues with hosts, which will help you decide if it’s right for you. Issues that come up include not really having “unlimited” bandwidth (may not be a problem for you if your site is small), whether they provide phone support, or efficient ticket support, or the amount of downtime.
When looking at the reviews on Web Hosting Search check out that “Show advanced features” button. It makes it so easy to see an overview of the service offerings!
I’m keen to see more reviews on there! If you have experience with web hosts then submit your reviews and get the word out—good or bad.
So, how do you choose web hosting? What’s important to you and what information do you need to make a decision? Who’s your host, do you like them, and have you left a review of them anywhere?
Here is my main criteria in a host –
1. Ability to quickly get more IP addresses that are vastly different from other ones on my account.
2. 24-7 Support via phone and email. Anything less is just asking for a headache…been there done that…had sites down all weekend because there was no service on the weekends.
3. Unlimited number of domains can be hosted on the account (even if it costs a little extra per domain)
4. Control panel software must be easy to use
5. They have to have some high profile sites hosted by their company. I know this is an odd one, but it’s pretty good for weeding out fly by night companies that try to look bigger and better than they are. Been there, done that on this one too…sucks having a host disappear along with all of your files. Obviously, this could still happen even if they’re hosting something high profile, but at least if they shut down, you have allies with big pocketbooks that may help to get your data released.
Beyond that, you pretty much have to find out through trial and error. In 12+ years of running sites and dealing with probably 50 different hosts, I’ve learned that good places can turn to junk and you have to know when to cut your losses.
Brian — Thanks for your insights! #5 is interesting, and something I would never have thought of, but a good measuring stick I guess 🙂
In what situations do you need different IP addresses? Manually dealing with IPs is not something I’ve ever needed to do, but I’ve seen it as a feature on some hosting plans.
The IP addresses are for helping to get rid of your footprint if you’re running a bunch of sites. The more you can do to help throw competitors off your trail, the better 🙂 …or even helping to keep Google from being able to easily tie your sites together if you do a lot of cross linking.
I agree with Brian’s points, although I don’t necessarily require much in the IP address arena. Of course, I want good up times and the flexibility to upgrade the hosting as needed. Not everyone needs ‘unlimited’ (which by definition cannot be possible) to begin with.
I definitely look at their client list (especially if I haven’t heard specific reviews). I mean, really, not many can beat the client list of MediaTemple.net for their higher end products and services.
All things being equal, I think the user interface should be a huge deciding factor. Anyone who has tried to work 5 minutes on GoDaddy should understand what I mean. Who designed that? A 5 year old!?
And now, I’ve been using MaxCDN, so compatibility with services like that are now a must.
Great topic for a post! In order of importance to me:
1) Service & Support – In the 10 years I’ve used my main hosting company we’ve had only a couple of incidences of downtime. They’ve been very helpful with any technical queries including application installs that they really are not obliged to support. You wouldn’t get that with budget hosting companies. My company has a ticketing system that they prefer you use, but within normal office hours I can pick up the phone and get help. I do wish they had an emergency out of hours line or evening office hours, but I understand how that would impact on overall cost. If you submit an emergency ticket someone on call will pick it up.
2) Location of servers – though now there are other ways to let search engines know what country your site targets, there was the time that if you had a .com, net., etc. domain and wanted your site to come up for searches when people filtered by your country on sites like google.ie or yahoo.co.uk; your site had to be hosted in that country. Based in Ireland, this was a very important factor to me. Now you can indicate target location in Google Webmaster Tools, but in some cases the location of your server may be significant. (This is probably not too much of an issue for US based developers).
3) Speed – many people outside the US insist on hosting in the US thinking there are ‘better’ hosting companies there and the infrastructure to provide much faster load times, but I’ve never been too hung up on this. I always found my host to provide fast enough loading, etc. If there was a noticeable difference, I would change though, especially now that load times are a factor in Google rankings. Again, location of your target audience may be a factor to speed – does having a server in the target country improve speed? Ireland, even though seen as a very technical country, has really really bad communications infrastructure!
4) Cost – another thing I’ve not been too hung up with, but as a reseller I’ve recently renegotiated costs with my host to bring the pricing inline with other hosts using same interface and providing same service level. It was just stupid to not bring my costs down wherever I could. I tried a cheaper US hosting company.
5) Being up on new technologies – I had to move some sites because the server I was on didn’t have MySQL upgraded so WordPress would run. That’s pretty basic stuff -and if you are with a hosting company that’s on top of what’s new and what needs to be upgraded, then you can be as well!
6) Interface – maybe cos I am not too technical and manage with the basics, I don’t rate this as highly important, but as I use more applications and want to be able to sort more things for myself, this becomes more and more important to me.
7) Good Reseller package with own branding – nice to have once the other necessities are covered
8) As noted by Brian L, IP addresses could become an issue with me though in a recent talk by Matt Cutts I attended this question was posed and he said that links between sites on same servers, if relevant in content, shouldn’t be less valuable than links to sites on other servers/IP addresses – just to watch out to not appear as unnatural links and be flagged as a link farm.
9) Apps provided for one click install – I thought this would be important, but I nearly always install the apps I want myself for great control. This could be handy if you want your client to be able to install things themselves.
If I have a client that wants to stay with a current hosting company or wants to use one in particular for some reason, I ask Twitter about people’s experiences with that company to see if there’s much good or bad feedback. 9 times out of 10 I regret that I didn’t get them to move to my hosting because I know it inside and out and it suits the apps I use and the way I work. I recently redeveloped a site for a client, and we needed to switch from Windows hosting. They stayed with the existing company even though it would have been as easy to move to mine. The existing company was using Zeus instead of Apache, so I had a bit of a job to redo the .htaccess redirects (all the file names were changing in the redevelopment) as they had to be done differently — added cost to the client.
Support is the most important for myself, my hosting company has 24 chat, so if my site is down I can contact someone within two minutes.
Interface is also important and security, there were just couple of hosting companies hacked.
I find it best to pay more for better service.
Security! — should’ve been high on my list and I didn’t even think of it!!!! Most people don’t know what to ask when looking at hosting companies.
Great question Kristarella,
I kind of lucked out first time, following the advice of someone who had experienced poor service on a regular basis until he found (and recommended to me ) my current host.
I’ve found that most of the points on lists above are taken care of by him….since he is highly responsive, it kind of means that he is automatically on top of upgrades/security etc.
Sometimes I think he must never sleeps he answers support tickets so fast out of hours….
Re: speed…I have a feeling that an increase in the use of cloud hosted caching service will render this a non-issue.
p.s. really nice re-design on your site BTW
It’s nice to read this discussion here away from all the affiliate marketing top 10 lists 🙂
I lucked out, when I first started up a friend suggested HostMonster and I’ve been very happy with them ever since for shared hosting. If I had to start over, I’d have chosen BlueHost, but having talked to them I’ve been assured the only different between the two is the color of the interface (green vs blue). Same company, same support personnel, same servers, same everything.
That said I’ve now had the experience of setting up sites on several other hosts for other people and it’s been miserable. GoDaddy and DreamHost’s control panels drive me insane. As does the one host I deal with daily for a client that is on IIS and running Helm.
Anyway “what is important” to me in rough order:
#1 24/7 chat and phone support
#2 Easy to use control panel with a minimum of customization. I want it standard, I want it that SAME on every host I deal with. Must be Apache based.
#3 Unlimited: Domains, Databases, etc… At least separate FTP accounts for each domain, preferably multiple accounts per domain and unlimited account on the account.
#4 Latest versions of software installed (PHP) – For me this often equals security
#5 Ability to override default installs (custom PHP.INI for example)
I don’t yet care about, but may soon:
– re-branded hosting for reselling (soon)
– site speed (hasn’t been a problem yet)
– migration path to VPS / CDN (I’d just like to see an upgrade path available for when speed becomes and issue)
Like some mentioned I lucked out on my first try.
The host I’m with is great to work with and the service has been great.
A few weeks back I had a problem that wasn’t too serious but sent him a support ticket, he replies from his laptop while at his wife’s side at the hospital waiting for the birth of their first child. Now that’s service..lol.
It’s small hosting company but they work very transparently and their good at keeping all customers up to date on what’s going on. They are also very open to finding custom solutions if need be.
That’s what I look for, then. A company who obviously cares about how they do business and their customers.
Since then I’ve become wary of these larger companies who appear to oversell a shared server via “unlimited” offers. I believe I said as much to Kristen on Twitter.
Anyway, a good host is like any other good business in my view and the same things should be looked at when choosing.
really a good site. Btw select domain.co.cc is not bad too
Thanks for sharing this wonderful article but i would like you to be publishing a new post atleast 3 times a week if you can because you have a nice content here. now back to your topic. Support is the most important for my hosting company, Incase if my site is down I can contact them within a min. They need have 24 hours customers services too.
Keep up the good work.
I’ll be coming back to this page the next time my contract is up… I’ve been a bit haphazard with my selections thus far, and have not been happy with the results.
GoDaddy – user interface is garbage, and my sites bogged down continuously. I’d complain about load speed and it would get better for a few days then slow down again. 45 seconds to load the wp-admin page? Really?
I’m now on MidPhase based on @pearsonified’s endorsement, and they are much faster for load times and the CP is much easier to use. That said, I’ve had three times in the past few months when the single point of failure server I’m on has slowed to a crawl (significantly slower than GoDaddy, but for brief periods). Each time I noticed it I would call and find that it was already being addressed, but the solution always took too long for me.
Thanks for all the ideas on what to look for.
I’ve been thinking more about this since first reading and commenting on it.
First, I think it’s fair to say that some of the important features are relevant regardless of the level (by level I mean shared, VPS, dedicated, cloud) of hosting you seek. The top one being 24/7 support availability for example.
However, we all learn for each other’s mistakes and I think it’d also be interesting to discuss the mistakes people made when picking a host. For example I just discovered a friend prepaid for 5 years of shared hosting on DreamHost. While she got a good deal I can’t imagine her actually staying with DH for 5 years, nor on shared hosting for much longer, whether DH offers a credit toward upgrading or not I don’t know.
The biggest thing I look for in a host is service that won’t shut my site down if I get on the from page of Slashdot or Digg. Also active monitoring. If something goes down I’d like them to be working on it by the time I find out about it.
When I first started out I went solely on pricing because I didn;t know any better and they all offered more than I thought I could ever want. Then the host I was with closed down and the owner was charged with scamming about half of the client base (I was in the lucky half).
After that I went based purely on big advertising brand recognition however I found that by this time I needed a little more freedom to dig behind the scenes than many mass market hosts were offering.
I then moved on to a local host as they had a decent reputation and had a great price offering what I thought was a happy medium but unfortunately I had some troubles with their support and ended up losing the free domain I had registered with them which was my next lesson of not to rely on your host for the domain.
Following this I eventually found Hostgator through their insane army of affiliates and have not had a problem in the 3+ years that I’ve been with them. Eventually however I realised that as things scaled up I would need somewhere that offered an easy upgrade path, in depth customisation and quailty support to help me get there. That’s when I also set up an account with a company called WiredTree who’s 24 hour support has been some of the best that I’ve found in any service online.
That brings you pretty much up to date where I now run a VPS for my main sites and have a smaller network of bargain hosts that I use for alternate IP addresses on mini sites and for testing new SEO strategies so they remain mostly disassociated from my central sites.
I would add only one thing to the points made by other commenters – I like to use separate hosting accounts tied in under a “reseller account”. That way, any website I set up gets its own control panel and there’s no messy interaction between so-called “add-on” domains.
This means I have to pay a little more, but since most of my clients run 2 or 3 sites anyway a reseller account (per client) is a great way to keep things smooth. Just set up each account using WHM (web host manager) & bobsyeruncle.
I’ve been doing this with the smallest Site5 reseller account for three years now & its served me & my clients well.
Thanks for such a good article. A good hosting provider shall have good support for their customers as well as user can also check their service and support during the refund policy period, just in case the web hosting provider do offer any refund policy.