After selecting the domain name it’s time to one more important and responsible step. You will need to choose a company that will provide you with a cheap but high-quality hosting for a website. Of course, you can try to manage by your own, but it is not the most optimal and cheapest way.
Even the smallest site located on your own computer will make you to adapt the entire system for it and provide faultless functioning. If an online resource has already been widely promoted and produces heavy traffic, you will need to buy a separate server. This is quite expensive even for a big company – to buy your own server for a website and hire a few specialists for its adjustments, support and maintenance.
It is reasonable to buy and maintain expensive hardware only in case, if you have a unique project that produces colossal traffic. For instance, it may be a development of a social network or an online game. In the rest of cases the most profitable way to provide proper working efficiency for a site is a good, inexpensive hosting.
You will find a lot of pages in the internet dedicated to rankings of different companies. Unfortunately, currently there is no portal that would combine all this information and give ability to define a leader quickly, not spending dozens of time.
Any big organization providing hosting services offers a lot of subscriptions that means a big choice of different servers. Some of them are modern and powerful, while some of them is outdated and located in zones with small response speed. Therefore a ranking is calculated by an arithmetic average and doesn’t show the real situation. Moreover, the ranking criteria are different on each resource.
There are a few factors that should be considered, when choosing the best quality and beneficial (cheap) hosting:
- A company that provides services in this area should not be a new one on the market, and it must have a lot of clients. It will be better if there will be a few big and famous companies among them. It points at the stability of servers for hosting and their price attractiveness.
- Technical characteristics – loading speed, wait for the response (ping), scheduled backup copies, the available disk capacity, etc. There must be MySQL and PHP services installed on the server.
- Modern and highly qualified technical support. It is better, when the personnel speak your native language. The lack of Russian client-service is met among foreign server hosting providers – sometimes they provide only support in English.
- The availability of test mode that is a 5-30 days term of free use with all capabilities of a paid server.
On high quality hosting websites you will always see the contact information for technical support, and there will be no third-party advertisements. If you have any questions or something is unclear for you, you can call the support and find out everything you need from the company specialists. It will also help to define how qualified and interested in clients they are.
It will be useful to read the feedback about the hosting on different websites. They can be positive in one place and negative in another, because 100% good hosting services do not exist. The combination of different opinions will help to get a general impression about specific provider.
You can find a lot of hosting providers offering to host your website on servers very cheaply or even for free. It is rather different from this in reality – the money spent on clients must be paid off in any case. Most likely this will require placing third-party ads on your web resource. A hosting also can be shareware. You will be provided with a minimum of memory space and the most necessary set of functions for hosting management. Any additionally connected service or feature will require additional payment.
A standard set of software from a free hosting plan is an Apache server, MySQL database and PHP programming language. It is reasonable to use free site hosting for creating a simple homepage or for learning web development or web design.
Hosting and development of a serious commercial project requires a high-quality paid hosting. Currently this service is in heavy demand. Therefore more and more companies appear, offering their services for website hosting on their servers. Beneficial and high-quality hosting will not obviously cost much. High competition level makes providers lower the prices, extend the functional hardware capabilities and improve the technical support quality.
