How to choose a web hosting provider

Picking a good hosting provider boils down to three S's -- speed, support, and security. For good measure, the scale may be another S-word to ponder.

What's important in a hosting provider?

"Great hosting boils down to the 3 S's: speed, support, and security," said Adam Berry, digital director at Wingard Creative. Nasdaq's Simon Ball, head of digital media services at Nasdaq Corporate Solutions, said scalability is also critical. "You need the ability to rapidly scale your website as your target audience grows and the resiliency to handle sudden bursts of high traffic," said Ball.

Hosting services are offered in a wide range of pricing ranging from a few dollars a month to thousands of dollars. If you're a small firm getting started, you can definitely do pretty well with a cloud, virtual private server, or managed service ranging from $10 to $100 per month.

Decide how much hand-holding you'll need. Basic customer service provides access to email, ticket, and phone help. Turnaround time on requests, however, will vary. Some service providers also offer 24-hour phone assistance. The limiting factor to non-managed service is that while a vendor may answer queries about basic setup, it won't be your systems manager.

If you wish to entrust the management of your site altogether, then you want to explore managed service. Providers of managed service will make sure your system is configured appropriately for your load, keep an eye on security risks, patch your software as needed and handle backups among other responsibilities.

Estimate the quantity of traffic you expect (and be honest with yourself) (and be honest with yourself). Hosting providers often charge based on storage and bandwidth usage. Bandwidth is a measure of how many bytes you serve over a specific period. If you expect only a few folks to visit your site, bandwidth will below. But if you're suddenly featured at the top of Google or your product goes popular you may expect bandwidth requirements to increase.

As long as you're honest with yourself, there's not much of a danger. For example, if you plan to just provide a few pages to a few local consumers, you'll never run afoul of any limits. But if you know that you're actually constructing a site that will burden low-end shared servers, make sure to use a dedicated or cloud-based server. That's next.

Understand server kinds. The very inexpensive hosting is accessible on shared servers, where one box may run hundreds of websites. The performance of your site depends on the load all the other sites are putting on the host. Shared hosting also limits your access to the server's capabilities, often limiting you to uploading files via FTP or SFTP, barring shell access, restricting what programs you can run on the service, and limiting the amount of database access your site can conduct.

The next step up is VPS (for virtual private server), which is a full instance of a virtual machine (a simulated computer) running on a box. Usually, hosting providers operate numerous VPS instances on one server, although performance is usually always greater than base-level shared services. If you utilize a VPS, you should be familiar with fundamental server maintenance and management.

If you don't want to share performance with other sites, consider a dedicated server, a physical box that's rented to you. It's the same as having a server sitting behind your desk, only it's situated in a service provider's data center. Only those with system management abilities need to apply.

Cloud servers may be a better choice. They mainly run on the giant public clouds, such as Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure. Service providers can construct whatever arrangement suits the demands of their consumers. The primary benefit of cloud servers is that you can scale seamlessly. If you need to be able to handle that significant traffic surge, just pay your provider additional money. Nothing needs to be moved or rebuilt.

Be aware of endless offerings. Some hosting services provide so-called limitless storage and bandwidth for a few bucks a month. This bargain often isn't what it seems to be. If you pay three bucks a month for hosting, there will likely be anything in your terms of service permitting your hosting company to either limit your performance or shut you down after a specific usage threshold.

Choose a portable content management system to avoid lock-in. Most hosts are quite good, but times change. Management changes, mergers, and technology developments can modify your web hosting agreements. Make sure your site isn't locked to anyone host — and that you have a backup practice in place.

For my business, I make sure I use an open-source content management system. Many people use WordPress on top of PHP, which will operate on just about anything. Do regular upgrades and site backups, so you always have access to your site's data, media, and structure. This strategy implies all you need to do is load your backup on another provider's service and point your domain name to that provider.

Own your domain name. Nicholas Rubright, founder, and CEO of streaming music service Dozmia recommends that all fledgling businesses own their domains. "Make sure you own the domain. That way you can change providers if needed, and own any earned SEO benefits," said Rubright.

Now that you know how to get your site up onto the internet, you're all prepared to get started. Go ahead and build something magnificent. Check out our web hosting providers section to locate a service that works for you.