If you want to start a blog or a website, The first 2 thing you have to look for are Domain Name and Web Host space. If you want to start a personal blog than there are many free solutions as well. Such as Blogger, WordPress etc. Hosting is required when you want to host a self-hosted website, WordPress based personal or professional blog, Portfolio etc. Coming back to the point, All the hosting providers show their hosting plans in almost same way. The main features you should look for are as follows.
- Reputation of the Hosting Comapny
- Server Location
- Alloted Space
- Allowed Monthly Bandwidth
- Cpanel
- Allowed Add-ons
Now I will tell you What these Technical terms mean and how Most of the hosting companies may try to loot you by hiding some of the main features.
Reputation of the Hosting Comapny
First thing you should look for in a hosting company is there Reputation. By the Reputation here, I mean Uptime History, Security, and Support. You should talk about different hosting companies with your friends and other bloggers on social groups on Facebook and other networks. The main thing you should look for is good user reviews. If you find satisfied customers and users of a hosting company which is attracting you, You should ask whether the hosting company is keeping their site’s data safe and sound? Once I hosted 1 of my WordPress based sites on a hosting comapny, I turned it into an auto-pilot type of thing, and after a couple of days I received a fishy Email from a site saying that my password has been reset, when I check that site, It was having complete data of my site which was hosted on that cheap host. That’s why I consider Repute of a Hosting company above every other thing.
Allotted Space
The second thing you should look for in a hosting plan is the Amount of Web Space allotted to you. If you want to host a resource hungry site such as a site that has a lot of images going on or something like a site that allows its users to host Videos. You should definitely go for an unlimited space plan. If you want to host a personal blog or portfolio, a couple of GBs of web space would be more than enough.
Allowed monthly bandwidth
The next thing you should look for is the amount of Bandwidth allowed to you. It is usually in tens of GBs and you have to look for enough Bandwidth plan according to your site’s traffic. Bandwidth is the amount of data that your hosted site(s) can use per month. If you are expecting huge number of visits, You should definitely go for possibly a plan with unlimited bandwidth. If you’re just starting your website and not expecting heavy traffic, You would be a Happy Blogger with limited bandwidth.
Server Location
The next thing you should look for is a the location of server on which your site is going to be host. Even in the latest era of technology, Server location is still considered as the main factors in site’s operating speed. If you are expecting most of visitors to your site from Australia, You should avoid hosting your site in USA. Same thing goes for others. Yes, there are some awesome CDN services like CloudFlare to cache your site’s data on their servers available world-wide, but still if you can grab hosting server located near your main traffic country, It is gonna be a great bang in speed as well as ranking.
CPanel
CPanel is the most famous Web-Hosting control panel. It has many features in it, which allows the user to do many hosting management tasks with ease and quickly. It has PHPMyAdmin, MySQL Database manager, Softaculous, FileManager, FTP manager and a ton of other features in-built. Most of the hosting providers offer you an account of CPanel with their Hosting packages.
Allowed Add-ons
Last but not the least is the number of allowed Add-ons in the hosting plan. It includes a number of things in it such as,
- Number of allowed Add-on Domains.
If you are planning to host a couple of sites with different domain names then you should go for the hosting plan which allows you to host more than 1 Domain. - Number of allowed sub-domains.
Sub-domain is a domain which looks something like this. something.domain.com If you want the allow your users to have their own sub-domain or you want to host different things on same domain name then you should go for a Hosting plan which has a decent amount of sub-domains allowed. - Number of allowed MySQL Databases
MySQL Database is something that is used by almost every web application individually. Such as WordPress, VBulletin, Selfoss or any other web-Application. Most of the local hosting companies allow only a couple of MySQL databases and you have to upgrade, in case you need more MySQL databases. If you have no plan of installing any other application else your main application, You should go for any plan which allows you a few MySQL DBs. But, if you are planning to install more than 1 web applications then you should go for a plan which has more than 1 MySQL DBs. - Number of Allowed FTP Users and E-Mail Addresses.
FTP and E-Mail addresses are something that you should for only when you have a couple of team members and they also require for their personal E-Mail account at your domain and personal FTP accounts for their File Management needs. Emails will look like [email protected] and ftp accounts are used to manage and transfer files between hosting space and user’s computer.
I hope that now you’ll be able to find a good hosting plan that suites you best. If you liked our post, share this with others and join us on Social World so that you never miss any update from us.
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