In order to have your own fully functional website, you need to choose a suitable hosting service. If you intend to maintain a site that has a lot of visitors or is heavy on content, you need to consider where it will load from. It is a wrong opinion that the server must be in your country in order to load your site quickly.

There are a few things to look out for when looking at hosting company offers:

Price Period

Very often, companies announce the lowest possible prices, “getting away” with the fact that somewhere around the price they show one word – FROM. In this case, take a good look at the offer that is being offered, because it is possible that this is the price of a longer-term contract – for example, 3 years. Very often, if you buy a similar hosting package but are not satisfied, you may have problems with its cancellation and refund. This is because you purchased the package at a promotional price while refunds are calculated at the standard rate.

Limitations

By default, hosting companies state that they have no restrictions. We know from Einstein that this cannot be the case because everything has some capacity. Usually, hosting companies speculate with an “unlimited number of mailboxes”, but hide the fact that their volume is limited. You understand that if you have 200 mailboxes and each one uses 3GB of space, it would “weigh” a lot on the server. Similar is the case with traffic. There you normally have “untracked” traffic, which is however limited by the number of simultaneous connections (RAM or CPU of the machine). This, in short, means that it is physically impossible to have more than an n-th number of visitors on the site because the server will refuse some of the connections to it.

SSL Certificates and Domains

These security elements often cause additional headaches, especially with smaller hosting providers. Along with the standard cPanel, which is widely used, there is an option for a free SSL certificate, which encrypts the content of your site without any problems. It’s called Let’s Encrypt and usually, it is provided with the package itself. Among most smaller ones, it is not offered for free, but instead, you are helpfully offered an SSL certificate (per domain, per year) at a price of 10 GBP. This means that 10 such SSL certificates could cost more than the entire hosting package for a year. Domains are also widely offered for free for the first year, and usually the cost to extend that term is significantly different than what you could get elsewhere or from another hosting provider.

Site Builders

Probably most of you have seen the advertisements about how easy it is to have a website. Absolutely true, but hiding certain details as always. Site builders are far from new and they are not as shiny as represented. Usually, the sites made with them consist of several pages, with “wooden” content and without special features. The templates for them are limited and the possibilities to make changes to them – are reduced to a minimum. An additional aggravation is that a site that is made on such a builder is almost impossible to transfer to another, modern platform. Sometimes something as small as a contact form could take hours of programming and a lot of money to spend.

Responsiveness of staff

Of course, the hosting company’s staff is advertised as extremely responsive and available 24/7. If you don’t have solid technical knowledge, haven’t read all of the hosting company’s documentation for the platform you’re using, or haven’t run into similar issues before, it’s very likely that the technical terms will confuse you. It is possible that you are wasting money and time by not understanding the problem or the questions you are being asked. A correct, detailed, and simplified explanation of problems and ways to solve them is of utmost importance.

Regular backups

No site is immune to errors and problems. Regular backups of your entire hosting package and the ability to easily restore a file or the entire account to an old (working) date. That would save a lot of trouble. In the event that your site “breaks”, there is a risk that this will require a complete rewrite/remake of your site, and during the construction of the new site, it will not be accessible. Be sure to check whether the hosting company you (will) use offers the option of regularly saving a copy of your site(s) and whether it is easy to restore them to older dates.