What features do matter the most when you choose a hosting plan/company ?

A

aandreyy96

New member
Two years ago I had a little hosting service and I noticed that people really wanted live chat support. I managed to implement a live chat support software and people were more satisfied than before.
Other webmasters care the most about the amount of requests/visitors it can handle.

For me, the control panel and implementation/configuration matters the most, then the price and disk space.

For one of my clients (i'm a freelancer), i used a hosting company from romania that uses whmcs with cpanel, very well configured, and we love it. We can make backups and we can restore everything with a few clicks, we have live chat support, if we have a problem we can talk to them in a minute, cloudflare is integrated in the cpanel, everything works very well and the price is decent.

What are the features that you can't live without ?
When you search for a hosting company or plan what are you looking for ?
What is more important for you ? The brand, online reviews, disk space, price, support ?
 
Genesis

Genesis

Administrator
Staff member
For me what matters most is up to date technology with WHM/cPanel. At the same time speed and up time. I'm always in a hurry and hate it when things drag. Up time is important as it is a sign of really good administration. Price is important but relative to value. Cheap can turn into expensive if it is a poorly managed Web host. A fast turn around in Admin support is also very important.

The Data Centre must have good clients. Which is easy to research these days. If you're sharing the same space with Web hosts who have hacked Websites or are hackers, there's a good chance it's going to affect credibility of one's Website sooner or later.
 
Hazem

Hazem

Member
1-Uptime
2-Support
3-Available Features
4-Server Software Version
5-Friendly Community ( if exists )
6-Upgrade
7-Durability
8-TOS !important
9-Backup routine
10-Price
 
F

fancy

New member
Someone posted something bout having latest linux distro is important before the Gigarank server update.

So I asked about whether it's always best to use:

1. latest linux version
2. 86 or 64
3. normal or slim version

Just to add, it's for wordpress hosting.
 
M

marked

New member
It depends on whether we are talking about paid hosting here or free.

When it comes to free hosting, my most important two considerations are:

1- Does the site allow developers to use their webspace as they want to? There have been some sites which issued me warning flags for simply testing out online encryption schemes, keeping encrypted webpages and running an automated client-server communication system. If the host is applying checks on things like these, I'm off. There are also some sites which refuse to allow the devs editing their php headers. Of course I don't mean that the host shouldn't check you on phish pages etc, but just getting suspicious for the heck of it gets me ditching that service and moving on.

2- Is the hosting ad-free? I know these days most free hosting comes ad-free. But considering I'm coming from times when geocities used to be the first option for free hosting, you would know where I belong to lol.

3- What is the monthly limit on data transfer? While I would be very happy to have 10 MB webspace with unlimited data transfer and not-so-paranoid admins, I would move off if the service focuses on webspace at the expense of data transfer limits.

With premium hosting, the most important things would be:

1- The uptime.

2- The bandwidth.

3- The price. As always, bandwidth is more important than webspace. Being a web dev, I only need to test my web apps online and once tested and debugged, I would remove my previous projects and host new ones. Simple as that. I actually often wonder what do people with 5 GB web space. Unless you are copying and uploading everything you come across during your internet life, there is NO WAY you can creatively populate 200 MB of web space, let alone talk in GBs ...

4- The reputation they have in hosting market. I do not mean that they must be big names like godaddy or hosting24 etc. But their customer base must be very satisfied. This can be checked with some searching on Mother Google.

5- How quick their help and support responds. And whether they actually have folks working on your complaint/question. Some services have dumb folks on the help desk who keep telling you that your problem will be solved "soon" ... and then you learn after 2 days they haven't even approached your stuff or opened it at all to see what the demons is wrong at all ...
 
smalpierre

smalpierre

New member
I'm working on a site right now that gets during peak months 60k unique visitors, with around 200 concurrent users. I've been playing with the idea of a VPS, but leaning toward a dedicated server. Rackspace has managed servers, they'll put whatever OS I want on there, and they'll deal with all hardware issues which is way better for me - colocation is a pain. Their pricing models are a little convoluted, and data transfer is one of the issues - my costs will be extremely variable and at times unpredictable. Another provider will give me plenty of data transfer, also in a data center with multiple fiber optic connections, and at a fixed price. My problem with them is that they only support CentOS. The LAMP stack on CentOS is stale and I want Debian because it's what I'm used to - so they'll have to answer a few questions before I'll go with them regarding what level of support I'll be losing. As long as I have a control panel to do backup/restores I'm fine with it.

It'll be running Xeon E3-1230 v23.3GHz 4C/8T, 32GB RAM, RAID 1 250gb SSD, with 10TB of transfer included in the base price. I'll be running Apache MPM worker, PHP-FPM / mod_fastcgi with Opcache. I might be running APCu and suEXEC as well, since there are 4 sites that make up the organizations footprint but I'm not 100% sure yet what the best way is.

So what's important to me? Absolute control over every aspect of the environment, super fast networks, high uptime, scalability, and support at the hardware level, ease of backup/restore ... Price has very little to do with it in this case. Another thing is that this is a very localized site - so data centers close to the user base for low latency is also important. Since traffic varies widely I also like straight forward pricing where I won't be all over the board depending on site traffic.
 
A

agentsky

New member
Availability should be my one of the feature that matters most. Since you don't want your website to be offline do you? The second is flexibility. The web host should be flexible to catering the latest trends in web.
 
FabioLux

FabioLux

New member
I think a good hosting provider must first have a good service, quality equipment, good uptime, I do not want my site offline. Cheap prices and a support helps the customer.
 
M

Mreno28

New member
aandreyy96 said:
Two years ago I had a little hosting service and I noticed that people really wanted live chat support. I managed to implement a live chat support software and people were more satisfied than before.
Other webmasters care the most about the amount of requests/visitors it can handle.

For me, the control panel and implementation/configuration matters the most, then the price and disk space.

For one of my clients (i'm a freelancer), i used a hosting company from romania that uses whmcs with cpanel, very well configured, and we love it. We can make backups and we can restore everything with a few clicks, we have live chat support, if we have a problem we can talk to them in a minute, cloudflare is integrated in the cpanel, everything works very well and the price is decent.

What are the features that you can't live without ?
When you search for a hosting company or plan what are you looking for ?
What is more important for you ? The brand, online reviews, disk space, price, support ?
Click to expand...
 
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