The Ultimate Website Hosting Selection Checklist
Selecting a website hosting company for your website(s) is one of the most important decisions you can make for your business. Your domain name is the brain of your online presence and your website is the heart. Why would you trust the storage of your heart anywhere less than the best?
In 20+ years of business, we have experienced probably every possible scenario with website hosting companies. We have owned our own dedicated servers and have subscribed to numerous reseller accounts as well. We have fallen victim to viruses and have had websites outright vanish never to be seen or recovered again!
Those nightmares were a long time ago. Fortunately, website hosting has evolved to a great extent. Yet, some hosting companies are still clinging to their old-school ways of providing website hosting, which is to pack as many websites onto a server as possible so that they can bottom-feed their pricing to beat out their competition.
When you overload a web server to provide the cheapest cost, what do you think happens? Overload!
Obviously, we recommend to all of our clients to host their websites through BestDomainPlace.com and have since 2003. Our ultimate website hosting selection checklist reinforces why we make this recommendation and we do not make this recommendation lightly. Years of trial, testing, error, and success have led us to fully support the system that powers the BestDomainName.com backbone.
Even if you choose a hosting company other than BestDomainPlace.com, use this information as a sort of checklist to make sure you are making the right selection when it comes to choosing your website hosting company.
Website Hosting Selection Item #1: Support Speed
There are three types of support provided by website hosting companies: Phone, Email, and Chat. People get sidetracked by method, however. They will often choose a website hosting company because it provides support by online chat so that they don’t have to talk to anyone on the phone.
Choosing a hosting company because of chat support is probably the biggest mistake a person can make when it comes to the selection process!
What you should be evaluating when it comes to website hosting support is the speed at which you get to converse with someone when you have a hosting problem.
When your website suddenly cannot be viewed by the general public (a variety of reasons can cause that to happen), you need to have assurance that you can get a response from the support department 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
If a hosting company’s online chat service ends at 8:00 p.m., and your issue begins at 9:00 p.m., chat service will not help you. You will wind up sending in an email to start a support ticket where your problem will simply be added to a queue where hundreds of other after-hours will be addressed with limited staff.
Of course lack of after hours support is not the case with every website hosting company. The point here is that it’s something you should consider.
We support BestDomainPlace.com hosting because telephone support is provided 24/7. We have called support over the years at every possible time of the day and night and on weekends. They always answer the phone in under five minutes. Most of the time, the first level support person can help with our issue. Rarely will a problem need to be escalated to second level support.
Website Hosting Selection Item #2: Website Access
Most website hosting companies provide such cheap website hosting because they limit the level at which you can access your website. When you realize you need things like access to cPanel, root, and SSL, the costs go up dramatically and pretty soon you’re paying more for your hosting than what you originally thought the costs would be.
BestDomainPlace.com hosting is no different in this area. You start out with basic hosting and then work your way up from there. If you have your own developer, your developer will want specific permissions to access files and server setup areas. If you run certain programs like daily cron jobs, you will need certain server requirements to make that happen.
There are two things specifically about BestDomainPlace website hosting that get an A+ rating from us and one of the biggest reasons we so heavily endorse this hosting platform. They are:
- Specific Website Hosting Packages for WordPress – Almost all of the websites we work with are WordPress websites. So, we are a bit weighted toward selecting website hosting companies that have special focus on hosting WordPress. WordPress websites have operational and security requirements specific to its software. BestDomainPlace has special web servers setup only for WordPress websites with these requirements in the top priority as part of their Managed WordPress Hosting plan.
- Emergency Services for Malware Removal – Even with the most high focus on WordPress security, there is always the possibility that malware or other malicious code can be placed on your WordPress website. When it happens, panic is immediate for every business owner that experiences it. The technical backbone company that powers the domain name system behind BestDomainPlace.com has recently purchased a company that offers immediate WordPress infection fixing and preventative support. Anytime, day or night, weekends and even holidays, if your WordPress website gets taken over, you have a place to call on the phone and get a guaranteed response time within 30 minutes to start fixing the problem! Not many website hosting companies offer that!
Website Hosting Selection Item #3: Website Backup Automation
A few years ago, we hosted several of our websites (yes, we had many clients!) on a few of the many EIG-owned platforms. HostGator, BlueHost, and FatCow are just a few of the big hosting companies taken over a few years ago by EIG. Read this review of EIG for a full list of hosting companies under the EIG umbrella.
EIG is a company that has been buying hosting companies over the years and merging them into their highly impersonal support system. Put it this way. If your website gets a virus and you get the dreaded black screen when you visit your website, you will contact your website hosting support center and they will enter a support ticket to fix the problem. Their support person will tell you (as they have told us in the past), “There are 800+ websites ahead of yours to fix. We will let you know when we are done but it could be several days.”
EIG hosting companies have some of the best pricing. So, be careful and avoid them at all costs. Poke around on business forums and Facebook groups and you will quickly see complaints in great number for EIG hosting companies. We suggest not taking the risk and host with an alternative…that has NO CHANCE of being bought out by EIG and added to their list of conglomerated hosting companies.
BestDomainPlace does NOT use an EIG When you host your website with BestDomainPlace.com you are on a system completely independent of EIG. The backbone infrastructure is so large that not even EIG would be able to buy it out. Keeping clear of EIG hosting was a primary motivator for us to endorse and support this hosting option.
Website Hosting Selection Item #4: Package Selection Help
We don’t mean to harp on support again. Well, yes we do! It’s that important! Here’s the point: Most people should be talking one-on-one by phone with their hosting company BEFORE they buy a website hosting package. You can do that with BestDomainPlace.com. First, start a free account. Then, call the support phone number and ask them which website package is right for you.
The only reason we even mention this as an option and a step you should take is because the people who pick up that phone really know their stuff! They will give you great advice and get you into the hosting package that really is right for you.
Website Hosting Selection Item #5: Longevity
This is another criteria item that most people neglect when choosing a website hosting company. Think of selecting a website hosting company to be much like joining a health club. If you walk into a health club and all their exercise machines are from the 1980’s, are you going to join that gym? Probably not. You want to join the ones with nice brand new state-of-the-art equipment.
The same applies with website hosting. Call your potential website host on the phone and ask them about what they’ve done over the past year toward adding new equipment and security measures. You might not understand their response (I sure don’t!), but the important thing will be when you hear of all the new additions in BestDomainPlace hosting.
The continuous adding of new features and continued development of web server hardware and software is key to predicting the forward longevity of any website hosting company. If the support department cannot clearly convey to you what new features have been added over the past year, then that is a clear sign they are poorly trained OR that the company is setting themselves up for an EIG buyout or simply are about to go out of business.
In Summary
Be very cautious with your website hosting company choice. Nowhere in these five core selection criterion have we discussed price. BestDomainPlace hosting is not the cheapest hosting available. But, it’s also not the most expensive either. The prices are fair and you definitely get what you pay for…and only what you need.
Hopefully this ultimate website hosting selection checklist has been helpful for you and we hope to hear you have become a BestDomainPlace client for all of your website hosting needs.
Here is a button that will take you to the form to complete to begin your account. There is no charge for creating this account and no commitment to buying anything. But, it will give you access to be able to call the support department to discuss the topics mentioned above.
