How to choose hosting for your website

The chat for site service will help you increase the number of leads and improve the customer experience. But in order to integrate the chat, you first need to create a site and place it on hosting and a domain. 

The smoothest and uninterrupted operation of your online store or online business card depends on the right choice of hosting provider and the service itself. 

In this article, our partners from Cityhost.ua will tell what criteria to pay attention to when choosing hosting. 

How to choose a hosting provider to work with

Hosting providers – these are companies that provide a range of services for hosting websites and other digital information. Among their offers, you can often find hosting, domains, dedicated and VPS servers, file storage and SSL certificates.

It is best when you can find everything you need for your site from one provider, so choose companies with a wide range of services. 

What else should you pay attention to when choosing a hosting provider? 

• customer reviews – positive and negative experiences of cooperation with the company, quality and speed of resolving issues;
• age of work – the long term of existence of the provider testifies to the experience, stability and reliability of its services;
• high uptime (uptime of servers) — the higher the indicator, the longer the site will work without stopping. A figure of 99.99% is considered ideal — you can find out this parameter on sites with ratings;
• support service – is there technical support, what are the methods of contacting specialists, how quickly do they respond (just check — write your question and see how employees communicate);
• security system – threat monitoring, authentication and authorization systems, virus and malware protection tools (usually all additional tools are specified directly in the tariff plans);

• quality equipment from well-known manufacturers, including Intel, Dell, HP, Supermicro, CISCO (providers often indicate this information on their website);
• availability of backup – saving web resource data in automatic mode, which allows you to safely experiment with the site;
• tariff line – how many tariffs the company offers and what features they have.

Choose a hosting provider slowly and use the opportunity to test hosting. Transfer the site to another provider — it is not an easy task, it requires time and effort. Therefore, it is better to immediately choose a company with which you will work for years. 

How to choose a hosting tariff for a website

When choosing hosting, pay special attention to tariffs. Companies usually offer several options, which differ in the size of disk space, RAM, number of main domains and subdomains. The cost of tariffs can differ by only 30-50 hryvnias, but space on an SSD/NVME disk – already by several tens of gigabytes.

What points you need to pay attention to before choosing a tariff:

• SSD/NVME disk space – it can be 10 GB (business card sites, Landing Page) or 60 GB (online stores, blogs), or even unlimited (large stores, sites with a large number of media files);
• PHP memory_limit – on average from 512 to 1536 MB. The more megabytes, the more efficiently you can use site scripts;
• Number of sites – a certain number of allowed domains that can be placed on the hosting (ideally — unlimited);
• Opportunity to get a free domain. Most companies offer a free domain, but the registration/transfer zone depends on the tariff;
• SSL certificate – provides encryption of data between the server and the user, increasing the security of data transmission. Depending on the tariff and the provider, it can be free or paid;
• Test period – the period of testing the provider's services, usually 5-10 days. 

If you do not know exactly which parameters are required for your project — consult technical support.

Hosting – it is not just renting resources on the server, but a guarantee of stable operation and scaling of the project. Choosing a reliable provider and the appropriate tariff allows you to connect the necessary technologies, increase the speed of loading pages, ensure protection against viruses, restore data in the event of an accident or loss during the configuration of a web resource, expand functionality, etc. That is why it is necessary to approach the choice of hoster and tariff responsibly, guided by the criteria specified in the article.