Features to Look For
When looking at any number of pages detailing the plans available from a hosting company, there are a ton of features listed. Which of these features are most important, and which ones are important to you?
The features and explanations listed below are some of the more important considerations when selecting a web hosting company and plan. They are listed from most important at the top, to least important at the bottom.
Support
The most important feature in a hosting plan is support. When trouble inevitably shows up for your site, you will want some friendly and fast help.
There are many things that can go wrong with the software or hardware on a web server. How well a company maintains those servers and keeps the software up to date is very important.
Speed
The time it takes for a web site to load is a very important feature in choosing a web host. A fast loading site leads to a better visitor experience and higher search rankings too!
There are many factors affecting the speed of a web site. There are a number of tools out there to test the response time of a web site, such as the developer tools that come with most modern browsers and sites such as webpagetest.org.
Comparing the speed of one company to another can be a difficult task. For that, look for the experience others have had with the company and how they reviewed the load time of their site. Keep in mind not all customers will be happy with even the best hosting companies out there.
In many cases, factors other than the web hosting company can have a major impact on the load time of a site. The base install of most content management systems is fairly fast. Once modules, plugins, and third party services are added, the load time could be much slower.
SSL
Have you ever looked for the green lock and https in the browser when loading a web page? That indicates the site is secure and has an SSL certificate installed.
Secure sites are becoming a must have on the web now, especially when entering personal information into a form or when purchasing products.
Search engines have been using the presence of a secure site as a ranking signal in their algorithm for years now and the strength of that signal is increasing over time. In the coming months and years, not having an SSL certificate for a web site may end up in a search ranking penalty.
With modern browsers supporting the HTTP/2 standard, secure sites now generally load much faster than non-secure sites.
So, when choosing a web hosting company, make sure they support the option to use an SSL certificate.
Bandwidth
Bandwidth is the amount of data sent by your web site to a visitor’s browser. The hosting companies measure this amount on a monthly period.
Hosting companies offer so much bandwidth these days that you don’t really need to worry about how much your site is using, with some exceptions. Sites designed to serve bandwidth-hungry applications, such as video streaming, backups, and other large files will cause problems with shared hosting plans.
With the plans offering unlimited bandwidth, you shouldn’t run into any issues unless you are using more than your fair share. In that case, unlimited bandwidth plans are not truly “unlimited”. Check with the hosting terms of service if you are running a bandwidth hungry application or file server.
There are still some hosting companies out there with smaller limits on the amount of bandwidth available in a plan and will shut down your site until the next billing period. Make sure to stay away from those companies.
Storage
How much storage you need can largely depend on the type of site you run. A simple blog, or mostly content site, will likely never run into an issue with shared hosting.
A more complex site with videos, documents, large images, etc, will need a VPS, Dedicated, or Cloud hosting environment.
Make sure to look for hosting companies offering plans with solid state drives (SSD). These are a newer type of storage drive with much faster read and write speeds than a traditional magnetic drive.
Backups
What would happen if the server crashed and you lost your web site files? It would be a simple task to restore it from a backup, but much harder to recreate all the content.
A solid backup strategy is important for any web site. Along with backups done by the web host, make sure you do your own backups of the web files and database and store them somewhere else besides on the server.
Make it a habit to create an off server backup at least once a week.
Most any hosting company will offer email services with their hosting packages. They provide software to send and receive emails, store them on the server and tools to manage emails.
People tend to move from one hosting company to another from time to time. Moving stored email files can be a bit of a pain.
I think it’s best to use a hosted email service for your domain name. That way, you don’t need to worry about moving the email files, or losing emails when moving servers or hosting companies.
Uptime
The measurement of the amount of time a server is available to the Internet in a given month is known as uptime. Most all hosting companies advertise a 99.99% uptime rate.
Since hosting systems are complex, downtime can be expected from time to time. It could be many issues from software configuration, hardware failure, or a network outage.
Some hosting companies do a better job with maintaining their systems than others, so taking a look at the uptime for their hosting services can help you avoid issues down the road.
Server Access
Access to the server file system is needed to upload your web files, database, and to interact with other services available.
Look for a web host allowing SSH access to the server. While most all of the companies out there allow this, there are many that do not. In the case of some specialized hosting services, full access to the files may not be necessary.
FTP is another way of accessing files on the server, but it isn’t secure. I recommend only interacting with the server via a secure connection to avoid access credentials and file information from being intercepted on the Internet.
Hosting companies typically maintain log files on each site hosted on their systems. These can be very useful in debugging application and server errors. Make sure you have access to the logs needed to find any errors in the loading of your web sites.
Software and Technology
The software installed on a web server can vary greatly from one company to another. Make sure you know the technology stack required for you web site files.
Most web servers out there run on the Linux operating systems, so this is most likely what you will be using. Depending on the site requirements, Windows hosting may be required, such as with a content management system based on the dot net framework.
Some notable software and technology features to be aware of:
Cron
Cron is a software service designed to run a task at scheduled intervals. Many sites utilize this for automated backups and cleanup of temporary files or items in the database.
Control Panel
Control panel software can make management of VPS, Dedicated, and Cloud Hosting much easier for people without much technical knowledge of how a web server is configured.
The control panel manages the software and configuration for you, and makes complex configuration changes to a server much easier. The most popular software for control panels are cPanel and Plesk.
Script Installer
A script installer is software to make the installation and configuration of popular web site software packages much easier. It makes the installation of content management systems, forums, wikis, e-commerce software, and much more a very simple process.
Statistics
Many software packages for web hosting servers include software to aggregate data from log files. The data is presented in a readable format.
While this data can be useful, it’s not the best indicator of visitor traffic to a web site. For that, use a third-party service such as Google Analytics.
With all these features out there, how do I know which web hosting company is best?
There are many excellent hosting companies out there. The decision to go with one or the other can be very difficult.
Take a look at reviews out there on the Internet to get a general consensus for which companies are best.
Beware of the large number of sites ranking the top 10 hosting companies. In most cases, they have not done their research based on people’s experiences, but rather on the size of the commission they receive from a referral.
Talk with web development companies and other web site owners to get good recommendations. A great place to network with other web site owners is on social media or forum sites.