How should you compare web hosts?

If you’re choosing a host for the first time, it can be overwhelming to try to figure out what you should be comparing web hosts on

Do you compare only by price?

By customer support

By largest disk space?

It’s really tough, since the features, wants, needs are different for everyone. Let’s highlight a few.

1) Compare web hosts on value not price

You shouldn’t compare web hosts just purely on the price.

If you’ve literally got $2 a month you can afford for hosting, well, maybe you’ll just have to go with that. But if you can swing a few more dollars, there’s a world of other things to compare that go into value beyond just price.

Price = the raw $ amount that the hosting will cost you

Value = what you actually get for that price

Let’s use a hypothetical situation, you have two options:

1. Web host A costs $3 a month, but you can only host one website, are only allowed 100 visitors a month, and you don’t get email hosting
2. Web host B costs $5 a month, but you can host unlimited websites, can have unlimited traffic, and it comes with email hosting

What’s a better value? Clearly it’s web host B.

2) Customer service for hosting is king

If you’re not an experience developer or techy, you’re going to need the customer service at a hosting company.

In fact, if you look at all the bad web hosting reviews, the #1 thing that comes up is customer service.

People get royally pissed off if the customer service takes 45 minutes to get on chat.

In fact, good customer service from a hosting company can more than make up for lower quality features, speed, and uptime.

3) Check the uptime percentages

It’s one of the most basic things you want in a host: that the website is actually live.

Ideally your web host would have 100% uptime. But that’s statistically impossible (I think).

So it’s really, really important to check uptime percentages with a hosting company. The good ones will release these stats for you. The bad ones will try to hide it.

In reality, 99% uptime is not that good. It means your website will be down for 87.6 hours a year. That’s not good enough for me.

Look for hosts with 99.999999% uptime.

Other hosting features to compare

There are so many things to compare, it’s bewildering, here’s just a few of them:

• Bandwith
• Storage space
• Site speed
• WordPress support
• SSL certificates
• Caching tools

The list goes on. What you need to do is create a list of your business needs and thoroughly research what’s best for you!