Mistakes to Avoid When Choosing A Web Hosting Company

One of the most important decisions that you make when starting a website or a blog is to choose the right web hosting provider. It’s quite easy to make mistakes when it comes to choosing a web hosting company if you’re a newbie or have not done any research.

It’s always good to be extra careful when you’re searching for a web hosting provider. That way, you can avoid ending up with a web host that suffers a lot of downtimes, load slowly, and offers a less than average experience for your website.

In this article, we’ve rounded some of the most common mistakes that you should definitely avoid so that you don’t end up with a costly mistake.

 

Not Checking The Reviews

After searching on Google for a web host, you might end up with a hosting company that seems to provide all the things you need for your website and best of all, it’s super affordable!

But here’s the thing, if it’s too good to be true, then odds are it probably is.

We can’t stress enough how important it is that you should always check the reviews of the company before making a commitment to them. You should look to places that offer unbiased and honest web host reviews and beware of the gimmicks. So that, you have an idea of how good or bad the hosting company is.

A few things that you should keep an eye out for in reviews are:

• Customer support complaints
• Downtime or server reliability complaints
• Viruses or security complaints
• Multiple complaints due to server overloads

Of course, there will be times when these reviews might be skewed or biased (whether positively or negatively), so you should always try to look for multiple resources when it comes to reviews.

 

Choosing Price Over Quality

If you’re just starting out your website or blog, you might not have a lot of budget for a web host. Unfortunately, if you want to have a good quality host, then you can’t let price be a factor when you’re looking for a web host.

As the old adage goes, “you get what you pay for”.

A hosting provider that charges you $3.50/month will probably have fewer features and performance compared to more expensive ones. Of course, that’s not to say that all cheap hosting providers are bad. You just need to know where to look for if you want the cheapest hosting providers around that still provides awesome features and performance.

 

Terrible Customer Service Or Support

It’s always a good idea to go for a web host that offers multiple customer supports — live chats, emails, 24/7 customer service, phone support, etc.

However, it’s not enough to just have all these support. You also need to look at the quality of the hosting provider’s customer support. What’s the point of a 24/7 support via live chat if it takes you days to get a response from them?

You should research a company’s customer support as they are the ones that will help you if anything goes wrong. Check for reviews online and at forums to find out what other customers are saying about the company’s support team. You can also test their customer support by asking them questions on their live chat before signing up.

If they can’t take the time to answer your questions before signing up, then it’s likely to get worse after you sign up.

 

Not Understanding “Unlimited Hosting”

Nowadays you’ll find that a lot of hosting providers are offering unlimited hosting, which might sound amazing at first. However, if you take the time to do a little a digging, you’ll realize that their unlimited hosting is not really unlimited.

Here’s the thing, when a company says that they offer unlimited hosting, what they really mean is that they are managing their limited server resources and usage closely to make sure that their hosting capacity does not suffer any significant shortages.

Since most hosting companies (good and bad) uses unlimited hosting, it helps to understand what unlimited hosting really means in the web hosting industry so that you don’t end up over-trusting your web host.

 

Ignoring The Terms Of Service

One big mistake that a lot of people tend to do is to not check the ToS (Terms of Service) and Mailing Policy of a web host before signing up. If you don’t read up on your host’s ToS, then chances are you’ll end up in big trouble sooner or later.

Hosting companies will often include limitations in their ToS for a number of things, such as unlimited hosting, by limiting your resource usage. There’s also Mailing Policy which can include various limitations, such as how many emails you can send and receive per hour.

The other big thing that you need to look at is the host’s refund policy. Sure, their banners might say “30 days hassle-free refund” or “90 days money back guaranteed”, but always double check by reading their ToS for the actual refund policy and whether it’s worth it or not.

You should always read their ToS and any other usage policies before signing up with a web host, in order to avoid any headaches later on.

 

Conclusion

Whether you’re starting a blog or a eCommerce website, you should always avoid the mistakes that we listed above when you’re looking for a web host. A good foundation is important if you want your website to be successful and it starts with choosing the right web host. And if you want to focus on building your business, while giving a professional service to manage the tech stuff, you may want to check PapaCare+ from HostPapa.

Are there any other mistakes that we should avoid when choosing a web host? Let us know in the comments!