In history, nations go to war mainly because of land. Each war is meant to expand the territory (land) of the victorious nation while reducing the territory of the losing one. All the empires that have ruled the world needed to dominate as much land mass as possible.
To this day, land continues to be a very important resource and source of wealth. In economics, land is regarded as one of the three factors of production. Any nation that has a large land mass at its disposal has a massive resource that can be put to great use. You can read all about it here.
What does land have to do with hosting or hosting companies? Well, land is to the physical world what hosting is to the digital domain. This is why you will often here websites referred to as “Online Real Estate”.
Based on the above, we can, therefore, say that hosting companies are online real estate brokers that offer you space upon which to erect your online structure which is your website.
Factors to Consider when Choosing a Hosting Company
If your website is important to you, then where it is hosted should equally be very important to you. The choice you make for a hosting company will determine a lot about efficiently your website will run.
Therefore before we go ahead to look at some of the hosting companies we consider among the best today, let’s take a few moments to look at what you should be considering when choosing a hosting company for your website.
Hosting Options
This is the first thing you should consider. What are the options offered by the company? There are many hosting plans out there today. You should take some time to look at the different options with a view to understanding which will suit your needs the best.
You can learn more about the different types of web hosting available here: https://www.techradar.com/web-hosting/what-are-the-different-types-of-web-hosting.
Your Website Requirements
After looking at the different options available, you should choose one based on the type of site you are building. If for example, you want to build a blog, you may just be fine with a WordPress plan. If you are setting up and eCommerce site, you may want something very well suited for that. Understand the needs of the website you want to build and choose the right plan based on this.
Expected Traffic
This is one of the most important things to consider when choosing a plan. One of the things you should look at is the bandwidth offered. This is important because this is what will determine how many visitors your site will be able to accommodate at the same time. If you are going to be getting visitors in trickles, then most basic plans will do. If however, you are expecting large traffic or a surge at some point, then your best bet will be something that can seamlessly expand to accommodate whatever traffic you get. We are talking about something like a cloud server.
Scalability
Most businesses start small and grow from there. It is therefore important for you to choose a company that offers easy scalability. If the needs of your site increase during the course of its use, you will want to increase the resources available to it without stress. This is important.
Support
Finally, support is one thing that is highly important to the success of any website. You need a company that will promptly respond to your complaints so that you won’t have a situation where you website is down and support is not responding quickly enough to help you address whatever issues you may be having. 24/7 support is a must.
You can learn more about other things to consider in this article.
A few Recommendations
Now that we’ve looked at a few consideration factors, let’s now look at some of the companies that we recommend.
Blue Host
This company offers a wide variety of services and plans to suit all kinds and sizes of businesses. You can get plans under its shared, virtual private servers or dedicated hosting services. The company also offers extras like domain names with shared hosting, Google and Microsoft Ad credits as well as SSL certificates. This is a company surely worth checking out.
Hostgator
This company also offers multiple plans across three main hosting services – shared, VPS and dedicated. The plans under these are however not as extensive as those offered by some others like Blue Host. Hostgator also offers free domains upon signup, valid for only one year.
One interesting thing about this company is its guarantee which allows up to 45 days during which you can request a refund. This is not something that you will find with most top companies.
Godaddy
This is easily one of the most popular companies that offer these services today. An important factor about the service offered is its support which can be accessed 24 hours of every day. You can call in and have the tech support walk you through any problems you may have. This is a great thing.
Of course, it offers a wide range of plans that also cover shared, virtual and dedicated services. Three of its shared plans offer unlimited website so you can add as many websites as the available resources can take. This is another company you will love working with.
iPage
A beginner or small business may not find too many options here. That said, the options available are not too expensive and full 24/7 support is offered including step-by-step tutorials on how to get set and rolling. You also get a customized email, payment integration and discount that will see paying just about $1.99 for your first month of the $7.99 monthly plan.
Siteground
Finally, this is another good company to consider. It does not exactly offer as many options as the others do and it also does not offer as much storage space. If however, you require a lot more space with a prospect of massively increasing traffic, you can take a look at its cloud-based service which offers seamless expansion to meet your needs.
To learn more about these companies, click right here.
Conclusion
The five companies we have listed above are among the best available. Revisit the part of the article that talks about what to consider before making a choice and then based on the points there, choose one of these to host your website.
Three things are critical when it comes to hosting. These are speed, support, and security. These three things ensure your website runs smoothly and safely. Thankfully, you can get these and more from these companies.
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