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Web hosting is the backbone of a website. It is crucial to the success of a blogger, business, and the website. A poor web hosting firm will have big downtimes. Because of poor infrastructure, the network latency will be high and your site will rank below faster websites in the search engines.
Web hosting services are of three types, shared, VPS, dedicated, and cloud. The shared hosting plans are the cheapest of the three. They are ideal for small sites owned by newbie webmasters and beginners. VPS and dedicated plans are costly as compared to shared. They are suitable for business or larger websites owned by experienced webmasters. Cloud platforms are suitable for websites whose traffic may explode anytime.
How to identify the best web hosting service?
Uptime: Webmasters use this metric to know how many active hours or minutes of a website were wasted because of a hosting failure. A good hosting provider will have an uptime of 99+%. The 1% downtime is due to maintenance activities at data centers, failure at DNS providers, ISP, etc.
Support: CPanel or Shared hosting service users are more of likely novice users or beginners using content management systems. The company that offers shared hosting plans must provide 24 x 7 support. They must offer three modes of support:
- Phone.
- Ticket.
- Live chat.
If the support isn’t good, no customer would recommend the service to others. VPS and Cloud providers must have good documentation for users to troubleshoot problems themselves.
Platforms: Hosting firms must provide support for popular languages, databases, and frameworks such as PHP, WordPress, Drupal, MySQL, etc.
Backup and logs: A cheap hosting provider should provide options to create website and database backups. It should also keep a record of visitors IP address.
Top hosting providers
Bluehost
BH hosts millions of websites and provides affordable shared, VPS, and cloud services for its customers. It has special plans for the WordPress users. Moreover, the customers also get a free domain name when they buy hosting from it. Bluehost is a company of robust infrastructure. Its support staffs are customer friendly and talented. They work 24 x 7 in shifts to help you out. It is one of the best web hosting under $5 for beginners.
Hostgator
HG has a solid network infrastructure and high-end servers for its users. The downtime of websites deployed on HG is low. As HostGator offers high-quality servers, the performance of websites is superb. I have used HG for a year. My site was never down in the 12 months.
DreamHost
DH is one of the oldest web hosting providers in the world. Having been incorporated in 1996, Dreamhost is two decades old company with a wealth of experience in handling small and large dynamic sites. DH is a reliable company with a good reputation, business model, and great plans for all types of websites. Plans from DH start at $7.95.
DigitalOcean
DO is a cloud hosting platform, which provides hosting plans starting at $5. It has a robust network infrastructure, which results in low latency for websites. It one of the few providers that enable users to upgrade their plan without losing the IP address.
Digital Ocean allows users to create and manage droplets that run one of the follow Linux distros:
- Ubuntu, FreeBSD, Fedora.
- Debian, CoreOS, CentOS.
Your droplet can have RAM within 512 MB to 64 GB. It is a cheaper and great alternative to Google cloud compute, Amazon web services, Microsoft Azure platforms.
See latest Digital Ocean plans.
Linode
Linode is one of my favorite cloud hosting firms. It is a company that powers several managed hosting providers. Linode allows you to view the CPU, RAM, bandwidth usage from the dashboard. It offers backup services and allows users to upgrade RAM, storage easily.
Linode powers a large number of popular websites and blogs. It offers great uptime and a 40 Gbe network.
Amazon AWS
AWS is the world’s largest cloud hosting service provider. It hosts websites that have several thousand real-time visitors. Amazon Web Services provides a variety of web hosting plans. It offers tools for installation of popular frameworks and software on your server.
Amazon has equipped AWS servers with latest processors and high-speed RAM modules. Its network is reliable and infrastructure is scalable.
Conclusion: Web Hosting services should be chosen carefully as you’ll be spending your hard earned money on it. To make sure that you don’t feel cheated after buying a plan, I’ve listed only the reliable hosting services. I’ve used many platforms. The companies that I’ve mentioned above are trustworthy.
Image via: Pixabay
