Similar to how restaurants have different menus that cater to customer tastes, and car manufactuers have different models to suit different needs, there are also many web hosting providers in today’s market that offer different speeds, security, and quality depending on your budget and requirements. If you’re wondering what aspects you should be paying attention to when choosing reliable web-hosting providers, here’s four things to keep in mind:

1. Bandwidth
   Think of bandwidth as the number of lanes on the road. The less the lanes, the less the cars can go through a single point in time. On the other hand, the wider the road, the more cars can pass. This works similarly to bandwidth, meaning that the larger your bandwidth, the more data can be transferred from the user to the hosting server and back at once. With that in mind, the more visitors your website is experiencing, the bigger the bandwidth you’ll need.
   
   
2. Uptime Guarantee
   No web hosting service provider in the world can reliabily offer you a 100 percent uptime because there is always something that can go wrong. However, what they can provide to you is a guarantee that your site will be available for a certain amount of time, expressed as a percentage. If you want a reliable and trustworthy service, look for ones that offer you 99.9 percent uptime. Though they might come at a cost, they’re worth the investment.
   
   
3. Storage
   Your website takes up space, meaning that the bigger the site, the bigger the storage you’ll be needing. Many factors will contribute to the size of your website, some of which will take up more space than others. For example, if your website is mostly made of written content and a few design aspects, it won’t take up as much space compared to sites that implement multiple high-quality images and videos. Also, keep in mind that if you have emails that are associated with your website’s domain, all the emails that are sent and received will also count towards your storage quota. Not all storage is created equal; SSD storage can be up to 20% faster when compared to servers using traditional magnetic storage drives.
   
   
4. Memory
   When it comes to hosting, your memory allocation works in much the same way as it does on your computer or laptop. Memory, also called random access memory (RAM) is used by scripts, software and processes running on your account. This means that when anyone runs a script, which can be as simple as accessing your WordPress homepage, some memory is going to be used to execute all of the processes involved. Because of this, if you have many scripts running on your account, you’ll typically need lots of RAM. As a general rule of thumb, look for providers that can guarantee you at least 1GB of RAM. As your website grows larger, you can always ask your hosting provider to increase your package or resource allocation as you see fit. If you’re unsure how much you need, speak with your hosting provider and ask for their opinion – they know their platform and can advise based on the experiences of other users.
   
   

Conclusion

We’ve discussed several important factors to keep in mind when choosing a reliable web hosting service. Should you need a helping hand in selecting a plan, speak to your hosting provider in the first instance and they’ll be able to offer a solution that will satisfy all your website requirements without spending any more than you have to. Plus, they’ll also be able to recommend some features that will make using the website much more straightforward. If you’re still looking for a reliable web hosting company to host your website, get in touch with us today to see how we can help!