By: fallen angel

A few days ago, a friend asked for my help in choosing a web hosting package. And just yesterday, I saw a blog asking for the same advice, prompting me to write this article.

In this article, I will share with you the criteria and the tools that I use for choosing a web hosting package.

Criteria

Now, from what I observed, most people make the mistake of using the storage of the web hosting package (i.e. 2GB storage, or 20GB storage, etc) and the bandwidth (20 GB per month, or unlimited, etc) as a primary, or the most important criteria in choosing a web hosting package. I, on the other hand, consider the storage and bandwidth as the least important criteria.

Why?

The amount of data you can store and the bandwidth is nothing compared to the performance (in terms of speed) and support service of the web hosting company that you sign up for. Even if you have unlimited storage and unlimited bandwidth, if the site is down most of the time, and the support is unresponsive, you will understand how frustrating it is to have committed a certain (if not large) amount of money on an unreliable web host.

So how do you find a reliable web host?

Tools

There are a few tools or methodologies that I use in order to determine the odds of a web host being reliable is high or not. The first, is the number of domains or subscribers the web host has. You can use the following tool:

http://www.webhosting.info/webhosts/

What the tool does is, it finds out the total domain that’s hosted by a particular web host. For example, DreamHost has about 700k domains. Why does this matter? Compare 2 hosts, one having 700 domains, and the other having 700k domains. Which one do you think has better resources to provide reliable support for you? If the webhost earns $2 (just an estimate) per month per domain, the one with 700 domains only earns $1400 per month. Do you think the webhost is sufficiently financed to provide 24/7 support? Or maintain a 99.99% uptime? Of course, this is just a guesswork, since the company with large funds may still provide a bad service, but if you look at the odds, which one will you bet on?

Of course, you don’t have to choose the web host with the most number of domains since its hosting package may not necessarily be attractive in terms of value-for-money. IMHO, as long as a web host has a sufficiently large number of domains, that should be enough. I’ll let you decide the number yourself, since it’s subjective.

Next is on the speed issue. How do you know if your webhost is fast enough? And especially important for those that serves visitors from all over the world, how sure are you that your web host can maintain its speed performance over different geographical regions? If you’re considering a local web host, and its sample sites loads fast for you, how sure are you it’ll load as fast in New York, or London, or even Japan? How can you find out?

This brings us to the next tool:

http://www.dotcom-monitor.com/task_hot_test.asp?id=1

This tool is a tool for sampling website performance from different geographical regions, from the US, Europe, Australia, etc. Bear in mind that website performance is also dependent on whether a site has been optimized for performance, and judge accordingly. As an example, on average, byfallenangel.com loads in about 1.5s over different geographical domains. Another site of mine takes an average of 3.5s to load. And another, 0.5s.

So, please also take this issue into consideration and don’t be misled by the fast performance of a text-only site. One equally important point is to ensure that the site loading time does not vary too far from different geographical regions.

Err, now that you have the tool, how do you find out if a web host performs well? Test its domain? Yes, if you don’t have much time to spare, the easiest way is to perform this test on the web host itself, although I wouldn’t recommend that you stop here. This is because the web host’s main domain could have been optimized to serve a large amount of traffic, and it may not reflect the true performance of your possibly assigned account.

What I will usually do is search for other sites that is hosted with the web host, and run the test on those sites instead. This will usually give a more accurate picture of the performance of your future site, should you decide to host there.

Good luck!