Web Hosting FAQ

Web Hosting FAQ General · What is a web hosting service? · How do I find the most suitable hosting plan? · How much does web hosting cost? · Do I have to pay in advance? Updated Reviews website hosting FAQ is a detailed list of all frequently asked questions and answers about web hosting including Shared hosting, VPS Hosting

Scale of Resources?

Many still tend to think that an unlimited amount of essential resources may cost a fortune. In actuality, there are many web hosts who are capable of providing such amount at very affordable price points. As we already mentioned, web hosting resources encompass several different elements. However, they’re all generally related to your server’s power and capabilities. Your plan’s available resources include your server’s storage space, memory, processing power, and the rate at which it can transfer data. Even the hosting packages built on shared servers can provide you with unlimited bandwidth, websites, storage or email accounts. So keep in mind to pick a provider who can deliver an apt amount of resources without compromising the client budget.

Loading Speed?

As Google said a few years ago – even a two-second delay can cause your website to lose potential customers. Everyone nowadays has a very short attention span. Especially on the internet, where everything happens at the speed of lightning, the online surfers expect every page to load in a few microseconds.

Page speed continues to be a hot topic in the SEO and UX spaces, and rightfully so. Even after five years, there is still an abundance of inaccurate or incomplete advice available regarding page speed. In my opinion, one of the often-ignored page speed topics is web hosting. In this article, I’ll share some of the data and experience I’ve gained regarding how web hosting impacts page load speed.

Hence, the web host of your choice needs to provide instantaneous page load. Many providers mention the exact average loading time on their website. Look for information like that on their official site and other reliable sources.

Uptime Percentage?

Even if your website pages take the least time to load, it is of no value when the interested customers can’t even access the site. In this day and age, the uptime of a website has to be at least 99.94% on average. So any web host who provides any lower uptime percentage than that, is not worth considering.

Uptime is the amount of time that a server has stayed up and running. This is usually listed as a percentage, like “99.9% uptime.” Uptime is a great measure of how good a web hosting provider is at keeping their systems up and running.

Some hosts even promise to compensate if the website ever goes down for longer than they promised. Pick a provider who is confident enough in their capabilities and whose uptime history for other clients align with their claims.

Domain Registration?

A domain registrar, sometimes called a DNS registrar (short for domain name server), is a business that sells domain names and handles the business of registering them. Domain names are the main address a website uses on the web—they’re the thing that usually starts with www and most often ends with .com. Most leading web hosts take care of the domain registration process for you. All you have to do is pick the domain name of your choice and check its availability. The provider can include this in their hosting plans which means you don’t have to pay any extra amount, they can offer you the registration at a discounted price or they can straight up charge you a few dollars. The first option works the best of course for site owners on a tight budget, but you may choose the others for transparency as well.

Email Accounts?

An email service is something like Outlook.com, Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, or the services provided by your ISP, domain registrar, school, or place of employment. A good web host lets you have unlimited or a fixed number of email accounts based on the chosen domain name. Besides, certain security measures also come with the package which ensures no spam can enter your inbox. Some of the providers include the perks of auto-responders which prepare a default reply to particular emails.

Website Transfer?

If this is not your first rodeo, you will need a web host who doesn’t charge extra to transfer your site from the previous provider to the new one. You can find this advantage in the hosting plans of most providers. Moving a site from one host to another is a complex task by itself. A domain transfer refers to the process of changing the designated registrar of a domain name. Once a transfer has been made, the new registrar will maintain all relevant information regarding the domain and the registrant. Taking on the disadvantage of paying extra for the transfer may just add to the inconvenience.

Backups Frequency?

We do offer complimentary backups for our customers. They are created on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. These backups are not guaranteed in any way. We highly recommend all Bluehost customers create and manage their own backups.

Depending on the set price point, the hosting plans provide data backups in weekly or daily basis. For the more affordable ones, they may impose a fixed number of backups for a day or a certain number of days to deliver the backups. It can also be automatic or manual. Daily automated backups are the most convenient choice.

The best option is to create your own weekly backups and store them locally on your home machine or burn them to disk. Please see our article: Download a full cPanel backup using the Site Backup & Restore tool for information on downloading a backup of your account or site.

Customer Support?

Proactive and knowledgeable customer support is crucial to any hosting service. No matter what kind of website you are running, it will definitely become a victim of some crash or issue at some point. If the support team does not respond to your call for help on time, it will cause huge losses for your business. Also, if the team does respond instantaneously but fails to provide the required solution, it is still as bad. So look for 24/7 customer support and if the support team receives any form of training beforehand.

Security Measures?

The most basic standard security measure for a hosted website is having a free SSL certificate. Along with this mandatory feature, your chosen web host must also offer scanning of network and servers. It should also remove the detected malware and protect the site from cyber-attacks. An ecommerce site must be PCI-compliant to guarantee secure financial transactions.

Developer-Friendly?

If your website requires a developer-friendly environment, find a hosting service that is compatible with the popular programming languages and platform. The common hosting service features of this category include support for multiple versions of PHP up to the latest 7.2, Node.js, Perl, Python, Apache and MySQL. All these can be valuable additions to your website hosting package and the developers on your team will be very grateful to have these at their disposal.

CMS Support?

For ecommerce websites, support for a CMS or content management system is crucial. Although WordPress is leading the CMS competition, you can go for more specialized platforms like Magento, Joomla, Drupal, PrestaShop etc. These platforms streamline many time-consuming functions and enable you to organize the site more efficiently.

Web Hosting FAQ