I’ve created this post for people who find themselves with no ideas about a web hosting company that they should choose. Even, if they have a website for a long time, the web hosting business changes every year. And new things become popular while other things disappear.
If you look in-depth, you will find that there are things that make the difference between these companies. Everyone should use them with any comparison. This helps both, webmasters, and hosting business owners. So, let’s see what are these factors.
Differences between web hosting services
The brand
There is no direct relation between the hosting brand, and your blog or website, but, it integrates with your final decision. The popular companies have their brands and that makes a difference in their marketing strategies and everything else.
The company brand and authority appear clearly in their articles and pages that are optimized for a specific keyword.
For example, some sites rank well with keywords that are related to other sites, and that’ because of their brand. An example of that is InMotion, it’s a popular hosting provider, and their brand that brings backlinks helps also to rank for thousands of keywords.
The customer support
There is no need to waste your time with hosting services with poor, or without customer support at all. It’s the first thing to look for, even, before thinking about prices. What really makes the difference is the way that agents treat their customers, and how they deal with specific situations.
Furthermore, every hosting provider should offer phone support that’s available in a few minutes. Also, the need to have a live chat and email support should be available.
The customer support team is responsible for the company’s image in the eye of webmasters, who looks for help, and they should get it. This important and can grow the hosting business or take it down.
The server configuration
I’ll talk about the configuration, even, before the infrastructure itself. The reason is simple, if you can set up and optimize your server for better performance and fewer issues, you will succeed even with problems.
If you look at some companies like InMotion, they offer exclusive SSD servers, but with great optimization that handles traffic and makes things easy to manage.
Of course, the server is well protected, at least, from known problems. What makes this company better is the way that they add options and settings, to boost the website RAM and use the traffic balancer the right way.
Security is a part of the configuration, but, some providers set up their server the wrong way and cause lots of issues. For example, they think about access, and that can affect the file permissions in WordPress, it needs extra work to solve the problem.
That’s why being in the middle of things is a good choice. You need to get secure hosting, but with a proper configuration that works for your application or CMS.
For WordPress hosting, no other company can beat WP Engine that I recommend. It’s a fully managed hosting with super-fast servers and amazing features.
Resource limitations
People, and especially, blogger look for unlimited bandwidth and disk space. At the same time, they only consume a few Gigabytes per month, like bandwidth, and that’s why hosting providers stopped talking about limitations, and they just offer unlimited hosting.
When websites become popular with lots of traffic, you should think about a VPS, at least, or you will get lots of downtimes and error messages. The hosting provider’s success can be boosted with unlimited resources in their sales pages and plan comparisons.
When we talk about server resources, we don’t only refer to RAM, CPU, and technical specifications, but also, we talk about prices compared to what the user gets as features and limits. In addition, webmasters may prefer monthly blog hosting and not a one-year billing upfront. That’s always valid for expensive hosting plans that not everyone can afford, so, the pricing should also be flexible and easy to adjust depending on many situations.
Customer feedback and reviews
The first thing that makes people want to host in this or that company is the feedback, and review that they find on the web. However, in many cases, reviews can be fake and it’s not easy to find the real ones. But, if you spend some time reading and comparing things, you should find a point where you can decide if the company is good or not.
When it comes to blog reviews, the majority of them are helpful. But, avoid new blogs with few posts, they can be built, especially, to promote a hosting company that they own.
The company’s website
The website is a very important element in the business. There are lots of hosting services with outdated designs and that look ugly, and even, broken. It’s not a choice to build a good design for their companies and you can get a positive signal of trust, and professionalism when you see a well-coded and organized website.
Prices should be clear and all the other details, especially, the technical information should be available for people.
The marketing strategy
All the popular and successful companies in the web hosting business have their advertising strategy. Wherever you go online, you will find their banner ads, and even, if you search something in Google related to them, you will find their website using different keywords.
These companies spend thousands of dollars with Google AdWords in a single day. Other companies spend a little or more, but, the main idea is that advertising will grow the business and make the company successful if it’s used correctly.
This doesn’t mean that you should only trust companies that advertise, because there are thousands of them and they offer great services, but simply, they have limited resources. In this case, advertising shouldn’t be a factor of trust or professionalism. But, having it, is a powerful weapon to win the competition.
Special offers and discounts
This is a real marketing weapon that companies use to get customers. It’s a win-win situation, where people get an exclusive discount and the company gets a new customer. The majority of companies use this strategy and they create dedicated pages for each offer.
People want to get discounts, and that plays an important role when it comes to success. It’s a good idea to offer a 30% discount on holidays, for example. Believe it or not, some companies get their profit from these promotions. It all depends on the imagination and the creativity of the people behind the marketing strategy.
I won’t talk about prices for one reason, cheap or expensive hosting is not a matter for people who just look for the quality. So, that will never affect their decision, and things like speed and customer support, are what they’re looking for.
Of course, these are some of the other factors, that make the difference, I just listed the most important ones. What about you?
