Choosing a Web Hosting Provider? Read the Fine Print...

Web hosting providers have evolved considerably over the years, and today offer a much wider range of services than ever before. In fact, they've become so versatile in their offerings, that there's something available for everyone. Whether you're an individual aspiring entrepreneur who wants to wow the world with your skills; or a small startup that needs to create its presence felt on the global market; or even a small or mid-sized business who's looking to offset some of its infrastructure costs by migrating some of the apps to a web hosting provider; there's something for everyone. Large enterprises of course have been using webhosting from the beginning, and are the most advanced users of the lot. Even they are constantly facing pressure to reduce their costs.

The challenge therefore is, how do you choose the right web hosting, that will not only cater to your current needs, but will also be scalable for your future ones as well? This is easier said than done, because there are so many service providers out there, both in India as well as the US, and each one promises to offer more and better services at a lower cost. We've explained the different types of web hosting options and the technical nitty-gritty you need to watch out for later in this story in much more detail. But before that, it's important to understand some of the broader points you need to keep in mind.

Read the fine print

One of our colleagues was looking for a web hosting provider to set up a website for his college alumni association, and decided to go with Bluehost.com, because it was cheap and offered a lot of templates, cpanel, etc for the job. After setting up the site, he discovered that it had put a cap on the number of emails it would send out per hour. So if there was a communication that had to be sent out to the entire alumni, one had to send it in batches of 150. Moreover, there was no option to upgrade this capability to send out more emails. Moreover, the hosting provider had taken the hosting charges upfront for two years, so one would have lost money by pulling out. So the lesson here is that you need to clearly define your requirement, and see whether the web host is offering you everything.

This was a pretty simple example for hosting a website, so you can imagine that as you get into more complicated forms of hosting, like taking up a dedicated server for instance, things can be even more complex. If you're not careful, you might end up paying more than what you expected.

For instance, the web hosting provider might be offering you a great server configuration at a very good price, but the software to manage that (like cPanel of Plex) would come at an extra cost. So you have to be very careful and determine exactly what you're getting.

Negotiate

This happens in every deal, so why not with hosting providers, given all the competition that's out there. But before you can negotiate, you need to do your homework and find out what others are offering. It may not be so important for hosting simple websites, because most of them are anyways available at rock bottom prices. But for more complex scenarios, you should look into it. Look at each and every component of what you're getting because there could be savings at each step. If you can't reduce the price, may be you can get more value-adds without paying anything extra!

When we started writing story, we started with the objective of finding a better web hosting provider that what we were currently using for our online forum. We found that the same service provider was offering a better server configuration than what we were using, and at the same price as we were paying. This sort of a thing will happen, because of falling hardware prices, and it creates scope for negotiation. So if you're already with a web hosting provider, then keep a tab on the new schemes being offered so that you can keep getting good bargains.

Choose carefully, because you can't keep switching

Lastly, you need to keep in mind that when you go with a data center hosting provider, you're in for the long haul. That's simply because you can't keep switching service providers. It takes time to do that, so choose your service provider very carefully in the first place so that you're not suddenly compelled to switch. Moreover, many service providers offer a discount if you're willing to pay their fee up-front for say six months or one year, or even two years. Some data centers offer 10% discount if you buy their services for a year, and 20% discount on the offer price if you take their services for two years, and so on. It might be a good idea to take up that offer.