When it comes to running an online business, a site is only as good as your web hosting provider lets it be. If you’ve got a slow web hosting provider or one that is constantly down, even a great site can appear to be poor as a result. Luckily, web hosting companies are starting to become much more reliable. Hosts such as FatCow, iPage, ThinkHost, and HostGator now offer 99.9999% uptime guarantees, which means you should expect your site to be accessible virtually 24/7. Choosing the right web host, however, is not an easy task.
There are multiple things to consider when deciding whether or not to host your site with a particular provider. Considerations such as cost, features, and support can greatly influence a decision on whether to go with one host over another. In the end, it all comes down to whether or not the features needed in switching from one host to another are actually used by your site. The easiest way to find out is to use our one of a kind web hosting matching system. By simply selecting your website package from our list of indexed packages, you can instantantly see which hosting providers most comprehensively support your application. By providing a side by side comparison, you can easily decide which host is right for you!
As far as hosts go, FatCow has been really been top notch in hosting for this site. Their support is excellent and you really get a lot of bang for your buck with their hosting plans. I also experience very little downtime and generally fairly fast site speed at all hours of the day. So the way they deal with this particular issue is really throwing me. FatCow is just one of the many hosts catalogged and indexed here. You can see the many options by visiting your favorite package such as WordPress, Drupal, vBulletin, Joomla, Ruby on Rails, and Moodle.
The real question is, when is it time to switch to better hosting and is the hosting really better?
There are many options out there ranging from 5-50 dollar shared hosting to 200-1000 dollar dedicated hosting / co-location. Obviously a dedicated plan is a big step forward, but generally for any site that receives a reasonable amout of traffic, the cost of this type of account is a little prohibitive, at least until they start producing a steady revenue stream. So, that leaves shared hosting solutions as a very affordable alternative.
The old adage, you get what you pay for, hasn’t always been true for me when it comes to paying for shared hosting. I’ve paid for cheap plans at sites like FatCow, iPage, and HostGator that have all worked beautifully with sites that recieved a very large amount of incoming traffic. As a result, I’m a little hesitant to recomment upgrading to a $30 or $40 a month hosting package as it’s hard to imagine it would do much to improve on already solid performance.
At the end of the day, switching to a dedicated hosting platform is really not that bad in the big scheme of expenses. With a small set of blogs or even a few great resource sites, you can easily generate enough revenue to cover the cost of the server with not much effort. The real issues is deciding when the right time to make the jump is, without sacrificing your user experience in the process. That’s a decision only you can make!
