“Look, all web hosts do the same. All have nearly the same uptime guarantee. Remember hosting charges are recurring; go with the cheapest one.”

It is the most common advice given to anyone who plans to host a website. 

By definition, uptime denotes the continuous availability of the web server for a specific period.  Everyone wants to make their website availble around the clock without any performance glitches.

It is quite natural that people prefer to host their websites on servers with high uptime. When the uptime values among the competitors are equal, the cost advantage becomes the deciding factor.

Not just customers, even experienced professionals in the industry too carry an impression that uptime is the most crucial yardstick to gauge the quality of a host.

However, my experiences of over a decade as a server administrator convinced me that the popular notion of excellent uptime means good hosting is not always right. Uptime is just one among the several parameters that define a good host. Giving too much importance to “uptime” values alone can land you in stressful situations.

Uptime- is it just an overrated value? 

An excellent uptime indicates a stable server, and we have all reasons to believe that websites hosted on such servers will have similar uptime. 

But in reality, it is not. 

For instance, if the server is running out of resources or experiences a network outage, the website will either inaccessible or dysfunctional. But the server will continue to have an impressive uptime as it is not down or rebooted.  

 Here I am trying to provide you with some tips for identifying a good host without actually hosting on it. 

Seven ways to Identify a good Webhost 

Let me make a declaimer first; there are no foolproof methods to identify a host’s performance without hosting with them. The steps I describe here are meant only to assist you in making an informed decision based on publically available data and its interpretations.  

1. Uptime: 

You might be wondering why I drag uptime again after bashing it a few paragraphs above. The reason is simple; uptime is still one of the primary indicators of the reliability of a hosting environment. 

One of the practical difficulties with uptime is that almost all hosts claim their uptime as 99.99% or 99.9999%. The subtle difference always gets overlooked, making the client choose the cheaper one. But there is a stark difference in the performance.

For instance, a host with 99% uptime for 30 days can have a downtime of around 7 hours. But for a host with 99.99% uptime, the downtime would be just 4 minutes, and it shrinks to 1 minute for a host with uptime of 99.9999%.

An excellent uptime indicates proper management of the servers. Huge investments for good infrastructure, security devices, and vast technical expertise are essential to maintain such a quality service. Naturally, their plans might be costlier than their competitors.

 Going with the cheapest host can cost you dearly due to the frequent downtimes, low SEO rankings, and the non-availability of proper support.

An expensive host needn’t be a great host. But a good host can never be the cheapest, except during campaigns. 

The most efficient tool to weed out low-quality hosting is a Service Level Agreement ( SLA) for real uptime. An SLA makes the company liable to compensate you for their failure in delivering the guaranteed uptime.

Only good hosts will have the confidence to offer such a service, and you can go with them confidently. 

2. Server Locations  

If your servers are away from the targeted market, the latency will be higher. Such a slow response can make the customers irritated and force them to check for alternate sources.

For instance, if your customer is in China, placing your sites in a Singapore facility would be more beneficial than a US data center. 

Quality hosting providers have DataCentres across continents. It significantly reduces the distance to reach the server and improves user engagement levels.

Better user engagement is a trigger for enhancing your SEO rankings and brand visibility across the online world.

Majority hosting providers offer speed tests to check the response time from your or client location to their facilities. Utilizing such an option is an efficient way to identify the best server location for your websites. 

3. Hosting Plans and Features 

Some substandard Webhosting companies lure customers with attractive offers such as unlimited bandwidth and disk space at throwaway prices. But quality web hosts try to gain customers through feature enhancements for a specific market. 

For an eCommerce website, going with a host that offers PCI compliant server would be a wiser decision than choosing a generic host with unlimited features. Similarly, the performance advantage for a dedicated Magento hosting will always outshine the cost advantages offered by a shared host. 

In short, you should focus more on the companies abilities to provide an ecosystem to enhance your website’s performance, instead of cost considerations alone. 

4. Infrastructure, Backups and Emergency Management 

The quality of the Datacenter is the most crucial element in defining the performance of a website. A well-maintained DC will have multiple routing options, power connections and has the necessary means to tackle natural disasters like floods or hurricanes. Making an effort to understand the DCs reputation, its facilities and efficiency in mitigating the risks is always a fruitful endeavor.  

Backups are not just a compressed piece of data; instead, they are the lifeboats during an emergency. Even with the best efforts, any server or DC can go down. A proper backup is an absolute necessity to restore normalcy with minimal service interruptions. 

Unfortunately, the majority of the hosting companies pass the buck of keeping the backup to the client instead of investing in quality backup solutions such as Continuous Data Protection (CDP). 

No server, whatever be the configurations and supportive system, is completely insulated from server down issues. Every system administrator will agree that managing these panic-stricken customers is actually more complicated than resolving the issue itself. 

As a host, the company should have an incident tracker mechanism to deal with such sporadic issues. Regular updates about the incident details, reasons, and resolution process, will build confidence and trust among the customers. It will reduce the ticket flow, and the admin can focus on the issue leading to a faster resolution. 

 If a company regularly address the technical issues on a public platform and keep the clients updated, such a company is meant to stay in business. You can trust such an organization that values transparency and has the confidence to disclose a clear picture of the state of affairs to its customers. 

5. Technology Adaptation

 WebHosting companies that leverage on old techniques are not just slowing the growth rate but pose severe security threats. By choosing such an environment for your website, you become exposed to various damages, and it can affect your business growth significantly. 

For instance, upgrading the memory on a cloud server is quite easy while the same process on a stand-alone server is a hectic and cumbersome experience.

All good hosts publish their technology adaptations in their offerings and through social media platforms. So always give brownie points for a host that move abreast with the technological advancements while comparing two competitors. 

6. Support

It’s a well-known fact that people leave companies not because of price but due to the quality of support. A company with 24/7 support availability through multiple channels such as chat support, helpdesk and phone support are valued highly among the competitors. 

The promise of impressive response time, such as 15 minutes, is irresistible for customers. Hosting companies are well aware of this client’s psychology, and they compete to reduce the time further, not on work but in promises. 

In the majority of the cases, they fulfill such unrealistic response time guarantees by canned responses such as : 

” We are looking into it.”

There is a high possibility for such a ticket to end up in the answered queue. 

Trust me; no tech is going to check the tickets in the answered status from the previous shift. So to resolve the issue, you have to reopen the ticket at a later stage, and it extends the resolution time. 

 Before subscribing to a service, always asks for a resolution time guarantee and check the possibilities for SLA. You may even try a live chat, helpdesk or phone support session to get a firsthand experience of the support quality. 

7. Reviews

In the online world, reviews are a great tool to get a picture of a company, its services, and customer relationship management. A lot of quality websites provide unbiased reviews about web hosts in core areas such as price, features, support and customer reviews. 

If a host makes active contributions in technology forums such as cPanel forums, Stack overflow, etc. then you can give them a competitive advantage. 

Continuous availability of your website is essential to fuel the growth of your business. So choosing the right host needs to be contemplative decision rather than intuitions based on one or two parameters alone.

 Good luck and happy hosting 🙂