It was 2001 when I first wanted to have my own website. A friend who just started a hosting company gave me a domain and some space on his server as a birthday gift. I was hooked immediately.
My personal website was my sanctuary, where I would dump all my thoughts, musings and world domination plans (with evil bunnies!) on it. Oh and some nice photos I took too.
Fast forward to a few years later, my website has seen both ups and downs. There were years that I was too busy with life and had no website online at all. Then there were a few of those years that I was hell-bent on having a good image online.
Now, everybody can have a website. Services like About.me and Flavors.me let you easily put up a digital hub of sort which has links out to your social media profiles and other places on the Web, and even let you link your own domain to it. Or you can have a TypePad or WordPress blog up there.
Personally, it just doesn’t feel the same. I am not against any of those services and in fact use some of them myself. And heck, I am a huge fan of WordPress!
But creating and hosting your own website is a different kind of drug. None of those hosted services can give you as much freedom as you can get on your own. Do you want to code yourself? Sure. Do you want to go rampage with all sort of CMS and frameworks you are interested? Go ahead. Do you want to continuously switch out CMS and test different things as you wish? Nobody’s stopping you.
See, that’s the kind of freedom I am talking about. And that’s why I am hooked.
For a personal website, I need to purchase two things: a domain and hosting. Domain is pretty much available from any providers at really similar pricing so it doesn’t matter. But hosting is entirely different story. Unlike domains, hosting services need to provide decent amount of features, good monthly pricing, good system resources for each hosting account, good customer support, and oh not to freaking go down ever so often!
Over the years, I have changed a lot of hosts. With some, I’d stayed for a couple years. With others, within months I was already on my way to find better alternatives. It’s goddamn hard to find a good hosting provider, mind you.
So without me even realizing, I was already on continual quest to find best hosting service providers for personal websites.
There are a few factors I look for in a hosting service. Here I have to tell you that I am only looking for shared hosting since I don’t need a VPS or dedicated server. Plus, the budget speaks for itself too.
- Decent system resources: Sure, a lot of hosts are now offering unlimited storage and bandwidth. While those are not limited, they impose limitations on how much RAM and CPU processing percentage we can use. I need my host to provide at least decent amount of resources for each shared hosting account, so that my site won’t go down after 200 hits.
- No lock-in:Â I hate long term contracts (except in marriage, maybe). With services, I want to move away if they fail to meet my expectations. Long term contracts will just lock me in to keep using their services, in full misery.
- Good customer support: Look, I don’t need them to fly me to their headquarter in private jet and treat me 10-course dinner, but I do need them to be at least responsive when I ask for support. And I am not talking about immediate response either. At least a few hours or so is fine, as long as they are helpful with my plight.
- Decent uptime: By decent, I mean 99.9% at least. That’s the standard. And if the host is not publishing their uptime and downtime statistics, I’d steer clear from them.
- Money back guarantee:Â Sure I know I can walk away if there are no long term contracts. But what if I find that I am not pleased within first few days? Money back guarantee will ensure I will get back my hard earned papers.
So those are some features I look for in a shared hosting service. I have gotten pretty good experiences with hosting companies I’d been with (for myself and clients) in the past few years using above criteria to evaluate. Your mileage may vary, but I can guarantee you that if you use the same criteria, you will never be gasping for life support again when your site goes down for 20th time in a month.
