Choosing a Website Hosting Company

March 20th 2012

Seth Carstens

How to go about choosing a host:

Choosing a host depends on your location, visitors, application, desired uptime and service level.

Sethmatics offers hosting packages, only for clients who also do custom development work with us. Why? Simple, on these sites we know exactly what the websites are doing and how they are affecting the server. This allows us to minimize the cost to the client (you) and maximize the uptime and speed of the server. Basically we can give you the best bang for your buck.

Skip to the hosting company referrals…

Now back to the issue at hand, choosing a hosting company. You need to consider the following questions:

Can you tell me where your “target audience” is located geographically?
Approximately how many unique visitors you expect or want to have on the site per month? (3,000 / 6,000 / 10,000 / 25,000 / 50,000+)
Will you be running an application like WordPress?
Desired Uptime? 99.5% uptime is about 48 hours of downtime per year

*Note that “Network Uptime” and “Website Uptime” are very different. 100% Network uptime should be a given at this point, 100% Website uptime is impossible, so anyone promising this is lying.

Service Level – if there is a problem with your server or your website, how soon do you expect a response? (Within the hour, Same Day, 48 Hours)

You can spend between $3.95 and $3,000 a month in Website hosting. Ok, you could spend more if you wanted to but at that point you probably wouldn’t need this article to tell you how to manage your resources if your project requires this type of hosting.

So what companies do we recommend in the US?

Low Budget? HostGator is your choice:

Medium Budget? Page.ly is your choice.

High Quality Dedicated Hosting? Firehost.com

If you need a consultation to determine the best way to setup your hosting servers, please fill out our quote request form, and we will get back to you with an estimate of the number of hours you will need to build a hosting plan for your project.