What To Look For A Good Web Hosting Plan

What should you look for when considering a better web hosting provider?

Web hosting companies usually offer multiple web hosting plans. It usually starts with a starter's pack, which is the cheapest and with lesser features. Which plan should you get? Should you go with the cheapest?

I have listed here 12 of the most important features of a web hosting plan can provide.

Choosing the Better Web Hosting Plan from a Web Host Provider

There are a many features that a web hosting provider should be able to deliver. Not all of them are available in one hosting plan. Cheaper plans have fewer features. So, choose the web hosting plan most appropriate to your website.

To guide you on what to look for in a better web hosting plan, I have listed 12 of them. There are more than 12 but are too technical to discuss here.

Based on my experience, these are hosting plan features that I am really particular with for the reason that I consider them very essential. To those who just look for a cheaper commercially popular web host, they may take these features for granted.

Trust me, you too, should look for these features. If what I have discussed here are beyond your jargon, by all means, consult a web specialist who would be happy to assist you.

The following are the features that you should look for in a good web hosting plan.

Green hosting

1 A green web host is one that uses renewable energy. Web hosting providers use huge servers that leave carbon footprints harmful to our environment. Thus, if you care for our Mother Earth, choose green web hosting.

Affordable price

2 Let’s be practical. As much as possible, we save our money. So, by all means, choose a web hosting plan that is very affordable. How much is affordable? Well, that actually depends on you.

Be careful not to be lured by $1 or free-hosting promotional gimmicks. Most likely, there is a catch behind that tempting cheap price. So, make sure that you understand the web hosting plan that you are choosing. If chat is available on the web host’s website, don’t be afraid to ask: what’s the catch? Usually, the catch is: the $1 is good only for one month; or, free means free trial period.

Unmetered bandwidth

3 Bandwidth is the maximum amount of data that can be transmitted at specific time from one point to another. In simplest term, it has something to do with speed. If the contents of your site are heavy and volume of traffic to your site is high, most likely your site would take time to load if your bandwidth is low.

Find a web host that offers unmetered (aka unlimited) bandwidth so that, at anytime, it can handle high volume traffic (multiple usages at the same time) and minimise buffering of large contents such as images, videos, apps and scripts.

If your web host does not offer unmetered bandwidth, you will be required to purchase additional bandwidth when such need arises. Paying extra bandwidth can be expensive.

Multiple domains hosted

4 This is a big advantage especially if you own or plan to own multiple websites under separate domain names. Rather than having separate accounts, might as well take advantage of having multiple sites in one account.

Other hosting plans offer only 1 domain name, which also means, only one website. Should you plan to have multiple sites, these would be sub-domains of your principal domain name.

To understand how sub-domains work, here is an example.

My principal site is amikvs.org. My other sites are called photos.amikvs.org, retailstore.amikvs.org, consulting.amikvs.org, etc, which are all subdomains of my principal domain.

Therefore, pick a plan that accommodates multiple domain names just in case you may need to branch out to other businesses in the future and build websites for them as well.

Encrypt Wildcard SSL

5 This is about security. If your website starts with HTTP, it is not secure for the users who are viewing your site. If it starts with HTTPS, it is secure. The main benefit of having HTTPS over HTTP is that the former protects the users from being attacked by hackers. In other words, it makes your site visitors safe.

Search engines favour more HTTPS sites.

Nightly Backup

6 This is one of the most important feature that you should look for a web hosting provider. A nightly backup gives you an assurance that your website and everything in it are recoverable in case something happens to your host’s web server. Otherwise, say goodbye to your data.

Unlimited disk space

7 A website does not occupy much disk space unless your site is about high resolution photos and HD videos. Other than that, you won’t really need a large disk space. However, it is still a better choice to have unlimited disk space so that there will always be room as your website grows. Otherwise, your website would be limited to its small size unless you purchase extra disk space, which could be expensive.

If high resolution photographs is of not importance to your website, the images you put on your site should be scaled to a lower resolution — less than 500kb — to allow them to load faster. If you are using heavy videos, it is better to put them on a separate host such as YouTube.

What if the main contents of your site are high-resolution photos and HD videos? In that case, you will be needing a dedicated server, which is expensive.

Multiple or unlimited MySQL databases

8 Most websites today use a database that store your site’s data in an organized and systematic manner. WordPress, for example, use one database to hold your contents such as texts and images. A database is necessary for a systematic storage and retrieval of your contents.

There are web hosting providers that allow only one database. In that case, you can only publish one website built with WordPress or similar CMS (content management system).

So, choose a web hosting plan that allows you to use unlimited number of MySQL databases so that you can publish multiple websites. If not unlimited, at least, look for a web host that allows more than 20 MySQL databases.

24/7 reliable technical support

9 No doubt, you need 24/7 technical support especially if you leave in a country the time zone of which is different from your web hosting provider. Look for the one with chat support so that you can avoid overseas call charges. Moreover, with a chat support, you can get immediate help compared to email support.

To test if the chat support is reliable, talk with the support via chat on its website and ask a few questions. It is important to find out if the chat support is friendly and the people behind it are accommodating and knowledgeable. Remember, though, to be polite and courteous; don’t provoke anything that will make the person behind the chat to react in an unbecoming way.

The next 3 features may be not as specially essential as the first 9 but worth mentioning.

Multiple Email Accounts

1 This can be valuable if you want to brand the email addresses of your staff who will be corresponding with your clients or customers. For example, instead of sending sales queries to mypersonalemail@gmail.com, it will be more presentable if you lead your customers to sales@mycompany.com.

For security reasons, however, having a Gmail or Yahoo email address is a wiser choice. In this regard, you can redirect your branded email address to your Gmail or Yahoo inbox. Ask your web specialist to assist you about this.

cPanel and Softaculous or Fantastico

2 Most web host providers already come with cPanel and Softaculous or Fantastico. A cPanel is your online dashboard or control panel that helps you to manage your websites. It is a necessity that makes your web specialist’s job a lot easier. Softaculous is a library of scripts that automate the installation of select apps such as WordPress. Fantastico works the same way.

If the web hosting provider does not provide cPanel with Softaculous or Fantastico, don’t pick that web host.

Honesty, Trustworthy, Truthful

3 If an organization is money-oriented rather than honest service-oriented, most likely it will offer you all kinds of gimmicks just to lure you in buying. People who are behind that kind of organization are hard to deal with for the reason that they will just send you a battery of lies.

Yes, I do understand that a business company needs robust finance in order to survive; but such is not an excuse to deliver false promises and below mediocre type of services.

This feature is never listed on web hosting plans. In fact, you will never know if the people behind the organization are honest, trustworthy and truthful. The only way to find out is through recommendation of other people.

What about reviews?

Unfortunately, not all reviews are objective.

My Recommendation

There they are. I have listed 12 of the best features of a good web hosting provider.

You might be asking, does it exist?

Yes, in fact, the provider that hosts all my websites have all these features. Go check out GreenGeeks and see the features yourselves. Being familiar with GreenGeeks, I could, more or less, easily address concerns my client might have regarding web hosting.