What to look out for when choosing a web host?

Many people focus too much on storage and bandwidth alone in choosing a web host which i believe is wrong to do so. YES, of course, you need to know the storage and bandwidth but that should be the least of your worries. Below i list a few technical details you need to know when choosing a web host:

  1. Inode limit : if you are going in for shared hosting, this should definitely be your first question. So what is an inode? An inode simply means a file or folder. What this implies is each email sent, each email received, each website file and folder, each image uploaded etc is an inode. The highest you can get in the shared hosting industry is 250,000(hard limit). most hosting services provide you with a soft limit by 100,000.
  2. Concurrent connections or entry processes: Simply put, this refers to the number of connections your hosting account can handle at a time(in a second or less). Mind you this does not mean the total number of visitors you can receive on your website. Anytime someone clicks on your website link a connection is made in a split second and that connection is released after. In my experience, the highest you can get in a shared hosting environment is 25 concurrent connections. Most hosting providers offer about just 20. what this means is that in a split second (less than a second) only 20 people can click on your link.
  3. I/O Limit: The web hosting I/O refers to the disk input and output (I/O). The disk I/O speed specifies how fast the website or scripts are allowed to carry out the input and output operations per second on your hosting server. Therefore, when it comes to the I/O range, the more the better. When someone visits your website or when you send or receive an email, your hosting server is carrying out the I/O operations. Most hosting companies offer just about 1Mb I/O limit. The issue here is that if you are running a blog or if you get huge traffic on your website especially running on WordPress then you might be experiencing some downtimes or error 503 more times. Here at kingscel we offer 2Mb I/O limit.
  4. Physical Memory/RAM: I believe anyone reading this has at least come across this word before. Just as in your phones and laptops, servers do have RAMs too. Your web host should at least allocate 1Gb Ram to your hosting account (Shared hosting).

choosing a web host

Other Main features to look out for when choosing a web host

  1. Customer support: Trust me when i tell you the availability and the ability for the customer support of your web host to quickly attend or respond an solve your issues is far the most important thing to look out for. Why do i say this? Well, with web hosting, there will always be a point you will need assistance with some technical difficulties. Sometimes, you would want to get something done but you have no idea how to go about it or you might experience a series of error codes with your website. A good support team alone can ease up your stress and make you feel you are in good hands.  
  2. Features: This is also an important factor to consider. You have to check and compare what makes the web host unique. Some features to  consider are : 
  • Backups
  • Caching
  • Free domain name
  • Malware Protection
  • Refund guarantee
  • etc

      3. Price: This should be the last thing to look out for. If you feel all the above stuff mentioned meets your requirements then you are in safe hands. 

Remember in choosing a web host, do not base it on the price offer.

Alright, there you go! these are the few resources you should look out for when choosing a web host.

checkout this nice piece of article on our blog on how to signup for web hosting