Domain Decisions – What You Should Be Looking For in a Web Hosting Package

In order to create an online presence for your website, whether it’s an ecommerce site or a simple blog, you need to build a website and you need somewhere to host that website. It’s similar to how, if you want to build a house, you need to build the house itself but you also need land to build the house on.

The provider you choose for web hosting in Singapore will set the foundation for your website, and, therefore, your entire online presence.

The provider you choose needs to have the capabilities, pricing and security that suit your unique needs.

Before choosing a hosting provider, you need to first outline what it is you want to do with your website:

What kind of website will you create?
Are you setting up a website with information about your business?
Are you starting a blog?
Will you be selling things on your website?

What you want your website to be able to do will dictate what types of services you need your hosting provider to offer.

Once you know the specifics of what you want to do with your website, you can then evaluate hosting providers based on a number of important criteria. Here we outline some of the more important ones.

Reliability

No matter what type of website you have, reliability is going to be one of the most important things to consider. Your website needs to remain up and running in order for people to visit it. Reliability of hosting providers is measures in uptime percentage. You want to find a provider that has a 99.5% or above uptime. Anything less than that means the provider is unreliable, and by extension your website would also be unreliable.

Shared or Private

Based on your needs, you will have to decide if you need shared or dedicated hosting and this can often point you in the direction of a provider that specializes in one or both of these services.

Shared hosting puts your website on a server with other people’s websites and has the benefits of lower costs and generally easier use. However, performance is tied to the other websites on your server and there isn’t as much security and flexibility as with a dedicated server.

A dedicated server allows your website to occupy a space that is completely your own. Dedicated servers are more expensive, but if you have, for example, a large ecommerce website, you will benefit from getting a faster and more secure site.

Price

Different hosting providers offer a variety of prices which are determined by several factors. Shared hosting is usually cheaper, but a dedicated server can provide better quality.

Another factor to consider when it comes to price is to check the sign up cost in comparison to the renewal cost. It’s fairly standard that the renewal cost will be more expensive than the sign up cost, so you should check the cost of both to avoid any surprises later on as well as to get a complete picture of what your hosting package will cost long term.

As with most purchases, price can often be a reasonable determinant of quality.

Having said that, what you want to do with your website also comes into play here. If you’re just running a standard blog, there’s no reason to choose an expensive hosting package. If you have complex needs and a wide audience then you may want to pay a bit more for better performance.

There are a variety of web hosting providers and packages for you to choose from. To make sure you have the plan, price and performance that suits your website, it’s important that you first lay out what you want your website or your business to be able to do.