How to Determine If a Hosting Service Is Reliable

When choosing your web hosting you should consider your needs, budget, services on offer, scalability, and reliability. The majority of those issues are easily verified by studying the terms of the deal on offer. However, you can’t judge a host’s reliability by them claiming that they can be trusted. Some objective data, as well as independent opinions, are necessary to determine if a hosting is reliable and secure.

Determine If a Web Hosting Is Reliable in 4 Steps

1. Check the uptime

The first thing to do when assessing a web hosting is monitoring website uptime using specialized tools like Hrank, UptimeRobot, updown.io, pingometer, etc. You should set up this same monitoring for your own website to observe how the hosting fares in dynamic as only reports exceeding a 30 days have some actual value.

When choosing the service, you can look for data reports provided by these tools from independent sources.

A reliable hosting never dips under 99% of uptime. Even that is a concerning low as you should look at the services that consistently maintain over 99.5%.

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2. Study independent reviews

The second thing to do when trying to determine if a web hosting is reliable is to study best hosting reviews. The ‘best’ here means ‘independent’ but you should understand that no service is truly independent in the modern world.

What you should look for are professional and honest services that openly admit that they are sponsored and make a note on the articles that come from these sponsorships. Professional reviewers live off these deals and there’s nothing bad about this. Such partnerships don’t make the reviews biased is the service providing them is good. In fact, it benefits the sponsors to have Internet reviewers brutally honest as the public trusts such opinions more.

Look for reviews coming from professional agencies that highlight both pros and cons of web hosting providers. The best ones will have solid data to back up their claims. For example, screenshots of website uptime reports mentioned above.

3. Find out built-in security measures

To determine if a web hosting is reliable you need to be sure that its security is the best it can be. This means using SSD servers, which are safer physically, as well as having a secure datacenter that is well-protected from any natural disasters, vandalism, etc.

Ensuring the physical security of the servers is nowhere near enough. A reliable hosting provider will be using RAID, top-quality security software, and have a backup data center for emergencies.

The frequency of data backup is also a question you should be asking your potential hosting provider. Daily backup is the only option to use if you want to run an efficient online business today. Even one day’s loss of data can have devastating consequences for the business.

4. Evaluate the customer support system

If you are using a shared server, you will mostly rely on the host’s ability to provide security and bring the website back up as fast as possible. That’s why to determine if a web hosting is reliable you need to find out what their customer support service’s response time is.

You can easily evaluate their professionalism and efficiency by contacting the service when researching the host. Assess the speed and quality of response provided by the operators. Don’t be afraid to ask hard questions about the protocols covering their actions in case of technical issues, cyber attacks, and other emergencies. The host should cover all these possibilities in their security guarantees listed in the contract as well.