Choosing the right hosting is not easy. There are many factors to consider, both economic and technical, which often cause difficulty.
In this tutorial, we will explain step by step what aspects to evaluate before purchasing your web space.
The Hosting is essential for allocating resources on the server such as mail, certified email (pec) and obviously domains and website content.
Like any decision related to your business, you should proceed gradually.
Strategic choice of the right hosting based on your needs
Ask yourself specific questions.
What do you need the hosting for? What features will you want to use?
This is fundamental in making the right choice. It's pointless to purchase a plus package with all the functions in the world if you'll never use them; you would just be wasting money.
Understand what your needs are, try to have clear ideas about what kind of website you want to develop (dynamic, static, a portal) and how many emails you will use.
Factors to consider before purchasing a hosting service
The main factors to keep in mind to understand the reliability of a hosting service are mainly two:
- Quality and effectiveness of support: if a hosting service does not guarantee 24/7 support, forget about it immediately. There must always be dedicated support that is contactable.
Any problem should at least be acknowledged at any time, and the opening of a report must always be allowed.
Moreover, it would be better if there was Italian support, otherwise you would be bounced from one call center to another around Europe. Last but not least, the speed of the support itself.
This includes waiting time for a phone response, as well as how quickly they respond to messages and tickets.
- Reviews of the hosting service: Another important factor is user reviews. Those who have already tried the service and its support will tell you precisely whether your choice is wise or if it's better to look elsewhere.
Technical factors for choosing a hosting service
If you're considering a serious and innovative project, and don't want to make a mistake with hosting, here are some tips to assess its factors.
Security, reliability, and performance: these three factors can scale with price but must be clear and without issues.
- SSL Certificate: an indispensable standard by now. Every hosting service worth its salt should be able to offer this data encryption for free.
Having this type of certificate is undoubtedly a guarantee of reliability especially when it comes to e-commerce;
- Connection Speed: essential for the website's page loading speed, it is also a key factor in terms of SEO;
- Up time: refers to the period of time in which the system remains on continuously; it's a factor that analyzes the stability of the website's performance: approximately 99% up time is an excellent indicator, below that threshold often results in system down times, creating service disruptions;
- Bandwidth and traffic volumes: these data are specified in the hosting package and are almost always higher than what you actually need, but it's always better to check, especially if you anticipate significant traffic spikes;
- PHP, Htaccess and SSH: these might be words unknown to you but they are essential. PHP is a scripting language among the most used for developing modern websites. Thus, the hosting must absolutely support it. Ruby and Python are also very widespread languages now, so pay attention to understand which ones are supported.
- FTP: is a service, actually a protocol, that is crucial for moving files into the folders that make up your website. This can be achieved with programs like FileZilla;
- cPanel Presence: cPanel is a control panel where you can check and manage all services. It's often included but always verify the ease of use as in some cases configuration panels can be real labyrinths;
- Presence of multiple hostings: if you use multiple domains even for redirects to the main domain, this is a priority feature;
- Email and certified email (PEC): we know that hosting also includes email and PEC services so evaluate carefully the quality of the mailboxes and the space you will be able to allocate in each of them;
- Automatic Website Backups: another feature to consider. Indeed, it is important to be able to restore a backup on a specific date, perhaps after PHP errors or human mistakes.
We conclude this tutorial by talking about three different types of hosting.
Different types of hosting: which one to choose
There are various types of hosting:
- Shared Hosting: This is the most commonly used type of hosting and undoubtedly the cheapest. A single server for x users. The bandwidth speed may suffer, but for developing an initial business it’s more than sufficient;
- Virtual Server: It's not a physical server but can still be shared with other users. The advantage of virtual servers is that you can do everything that you could do with your own server, for example, if you're under a hacker attack you could avoid it, and also the use of memory will be flexible and scalable;
- Dedicated Server: when you experience significant traffic spikes, shared hosting is not enough. You want to leverage all your resources without sharing them with others, that's where the dedicated server comes in.
These are the main factors you need to consider before choosing your hosting, caution: always think about the future!
These resources will need to be scalable because even if yours is a small project, it could become much larger in the future!
Choose Framework360 for your hosting
If you don't feel like configuring and managing the hosting yourself, you can rely on Framework360.
This platform, besides being the most innovative and complete for digital marketing, can offer you hosting on Amazon Web Services, the fastest there is, fully managed by expert system administrators.
With optimization that includes image compression, and clean, streamlined, and fast code that makes up the site, the result of years of experience and continuous improvements.
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