- Just as every car needs regular fuelling and servicing, so every website needs two things to run smoothly. It needs a domain name and it needs hosting. The domain name is the easy bit really. You decide what name you want to have and then see if it is available. If it is you buy it, or rather you rent it out at an annual cost and that's it. There is nothing to compare between companies selling domain names except cost. There is no ongoing servicing of a domain name required. With hosting it is very different.
How to decide on a hosting company
Category: Website Development
Hosting
The hosting refers to the storage on which your website files sit but also the infrastructure that allows the website to communicate with the outside world. As an owner of a website you will expect the hosting to be provided 24x7, 365 days a year and most of the time you will get companies claiming percentage availability in the high 90's.
As a customer you will almost not have to deal with the technical side of things as your web developer will do all that for you. You want a process for sign up that is clear and simple and you want a service that is good value for money.
As a web developer my needs are more extensive as I need to ensure that the hosting will support your website and has all necessary software available to be able to run the sites that I build. If you want your site to perform well in search engines then it is essential that the hosting chosen provides a fast service.
Let's look at some of the key requirements:
Operating System Software.
- Apache servers are much preferred over Windows servers. You may be tempted to purchase a Windows package if you are familiar with Windows applications and you may never have heard of Apache servers but they are far easier to manage and all of my sites without exception run on Apache servers.
- A few years ago I came across a web hosting company that were charging big money for their ‘gold’ package but were running ‘out of date’ levels of a language called PHP. PHP is what a website uses to communicate with other services. The Content Management System requires it, as does the Contact form. New versions of this language are being released regularly and a website’s code may need to be changed to adapt. The current version is 8.2.n but my software runs best at 8.1 so most of my sites are set to run at that level. If the hosting company doesn’t provide currently supported versions of PHP, I may not be able to provide a CMS managed site whereby you can change content yourself. Luckily the days of hosting companies running unsupported software seem to be past us but it pays to ask if a hosting company is new to you.
Technical Support
The next thing I look for when looking at hosting companies is the quality and accessibility of their technical support. I started out using 123Reg in the late 90’s but I found that their support availability deteriorated to such a level that I had to ‘raise a ticket’ and then wait a few days to get an answer. This is very frustrating as a client with a website but even more as a web developer trying to fix a problem quickly on behalf of my clients.
Siteground (from hero to zero)
In April 2017, looking for an alternative supplier of good quality hosting I came across Siteground and decided to give them a try, first with my own sites and then with sites for my clients. The key deciding factor that made it worth me investing a lot of time setting up sites on Siteground was the ease with which I could contact their technical support team. Every hosting company has slightly different ways of allowing a user like me to control how they manage things like publishing, setting up email addresses etc. Each hosting company also has its own idiosyncrasies which can take a while to understand and adapt to.
Sadly, the ease of actually being able to talk to their technical support team hasn't remained. I now have to go through an AI assisted interface first before I can even start an online chat session with someone. Even then I'm 'chatting' to someone who it seems has to refer my issue to technical support for anything more complicated and they are very happy to try and encourage me to pay for the 'expert help' that I used to get for free.
Secondly Siteground changed their control panel to make it more ‘user friendly’ but in doing so it lost some small features that I liked in the process.
Thirdly in early 2020 they introduced something called dynamic caching which simply keeps a copy of a website on the server for faster delivery next time a site is accessed but is a nightmare if like me you are regularly updating sites and want to see the updates in a browser. At first I couldn’t work out what was going on and despite ringing technical support several times (in the days when I could ring them) I couldn’t get any sensible answer as to why I was publishing changed pages and not seeing the updated page on line. Finally someone in tech support told me that they had implemented dynamic caching and pointed me to a help page from which I could download some code to disable it. All of my sites now have that code inbuilt so I do have a work around and I have launched many sites with Siteground since then without any further issues.
When I asked about how other people were able to maintain their sites (without having to disable Dynamic Caching) I was told that there is logic in the Wordpress system that identifies that a change has been made and automatically flushes the caching so that you can see the result of a published change in the browser. Thats all great for Wordpress users but not so great for the more than half of the world who don't use Wordpress.
Finally as of the 17th October 2024 Siteground have introduced a security check that denies access to the TotalCMS API which is essential for the correct operation of the content management system I use. The only workaround I have been given to date is for me to contact them via the tortuous support system and ask for this check to be removed at a website level. I have asked why this cannot be removed at a global level but I have as yet had no satisfactory answer.
To add insult to injury, when I try and add the IPS Tag 'Allsimple' to my Siteground domains in order to transfer away from Siteground, it refuses to accept this as a valid tag. It is valid. You can find it on the Nominet list of recognised hosting companies. Is this a simple mistake or is it Siteground making it difficult to leave them? I don't know but on top of everything else I've had to endure from them - I can't wait to get away from Siteground.
Allsimple.net
Recently a new client on the Isle of Arran told me about the hosting company he was using. He had a site built in Joomla which wasn’t very user friendly to say the least and I was hired to rebuild it. When it came to a discussion about hosting I was asked if I could stay with his existing hosting package with Allsimple.net. Initially I was a cautious because of previous experiences of trying to use hosting companies running unsupported versions of PHP and I told my client of that caveat. In fact Allsimple have everything I could hope for and crucially for me they have a very proactive technical support team who I can easily pick up a phone and talk to.
Allsimple are based in the UK and have servers near London which works for me and most of my clients.
Given the deterioration of services at Siteground I am no longer recommending them to any new clients. If you already have a Siteground package then I can make that work for you by raising a ticket to get a fix applied to allow access to the API but it is frankly absurd that we are in this position.
Cost
The last thing I look at is cost. One would hope that you get what you pay for but sadly that doesn’t seem to be so obvious in the world of hosting companies. At the time of writing this, Allsimple charge £4 a month for a hosting package that will support up to 4 domains/sites. By comparison Siteground charge £1.99 a month for a single site but that rises to a regular £13.99 a month after an unspecified number of months so after the first year you will be looking at approaching £200 a year for your website running costs. This shouldn’t be a deterrent if you are running a profitable business and rely on your website for new and repeat business but could be a nasty shock if you saw the £1.99 headline price and bought on that basis. One could argue I suppose that Siteground, like many larger hosts have resilience due to having many data centres around the world and may be better if you are appealing to a world market. However if you are doing business mainly in the UK then Allsimple is probably as good an option and for a world market we can always use Cloudflare to deploy copies of the site around the world.
The hosting refers to the storage on which your website files sit but also the infrastructure that allows the website to communicate with the outside world. As an owner of a website you will expect the hosting to be provided 24x7, 365 days a year and most of the time you will get companies claiming percentage availability in the high 90's.
As a customer you will almost not have to deal with the technical side of things as your web developer will do all that for you. You want a process for sign up that is clear and simple and you want a service that is good value for money.
As a web developer my needs are more extensive as I need to ensure that the hosting will support your website and has all necessary software available to be able to run the sites that I build. If you want your site to perform well in search engines then it is essential that the hosting chosen provides a fast service.
Let's look at some of the key requirements:
Operating System Software.
- Apache servers are much preferred over Windows servers. You may be tempted to purchase a Windows package if you are familiar with Windows applications and you may never have heard of Apache servers but they are far easier to manage and all of my sites without exception run on Apache servers.
- A few years ago I came across a web hosting company that were charging big money for their ‘gold’ package but were running ‘out of date’ levels of a language called PHP. PHP is what a website uses to communicate with other services. The Content Management System requires it, as does the Contact form. New versions of this language are being released regularly and a website’s code may need to be changed to adapt. The current version is 8.2.n but my software runs best at 8.1 so most of my sites are set to run at that level. If the hosting company doesn’t provide currently supported versions of PHP, I may not be able to provide a CMS managed site whereby you can change content yourself. Luckily the days of hosting companies running unsupported software seem to be past us but it pays to ask if a hosting company is new to you.
Technical Support
The next thing I look for when looking at hosting companies is the quality and accessibility of their technical support. I started out using 123Reg in the late 90’s but I found that their support availability deteriorated to such a level that I had to ‘raise a ticket’ and then wait a few days to get an answer. This is very frustrating as a client with a website but even more as a web developer trying to fix a problem quickly on behalf of my clients.
Siteground (from hero to zero)
In April 2017, looking for an alternative supplier of good quality hosting I came across Siteground and decided to give them a try, first with my own sites and then with sites for my clients. The key deciding factor that made it worth me investing a lot of time setting up sites on Siteground was the ease with which I could contact their technical support team. Every hosting company has slightly different ways of allowing a user like me to control how they manage things like publishing, setting up email addresses etc. Each hosting company also has its own idiosyncrasies which can take a while to understand and adapt to.
Sadly, the ease of actually being able to talk to their technical support team hasn't remained. I now have to go through an AI assisted interface first before I can even start an online chat session with someone. Even then I'm 'chatting' to someone who it seems has to refer my issue to technical support for anything more complicated and they are very happy to try and encourage me to pay for the 'expert help' that I used to get for free.
Secondly Siteground changed their control panel to make it more ‘user friendly’ but in doing so it lost some small features that I liked in the process.
Thirdly in early 2020 they introduced something called dynamic caching which simply keeps a copy of a website on the server for faster delivery next time a site is accessed but is a nightmare if like me you are regularly updating sites and want to see the updates in a browser. At first I couldn’t work out what was going on and despite ringing technical support several times (in the days when I could ring them) I couldn’t get any sensible answer as to why I was publishing changed pages and not seeing the updated page on line. Finally someone in tech support told me that they had implemented dynamic caching and pointed me to a help page from which I could download some code to disable it. All of my sites now have that code inbuilt so I do have a work around and I have launched many sites with Siteground since then without any further issues.
When I asked about how other people were able to maintain their sites (without having to disable Dynamic Caching) I was told that there is logic in the Wordpress system that identifies that a change has been made and automatically flushes the caching so that you can see the result of a published change in the browser. Thats all great for Wordpress users but not so great for the more than half of the world who don't use Wordpress.
Finally as of the 17th October 2024 Siteground have introduced a security check that denies access to the TotalCMS API which is essential for the correct operation of the content management system I use. The only workaround I have been given to date is for me to contact them via the tortuous support system and ask for this check to be removed at a website level. I have asked why this cannot be removed at a global level but I have as yet had no satisfactory answer.
To add insult to injury, when I try and add the IPS Tag 'Allsimple' to my Siteground domains in order to transfer away from Siteground, it refuses to accept this as a valid tag. It is valid. You can find it on the Nominet list of recognised hosting companies. Is this a simple mistake or is it Siteground making it difficult to leave them? I don't know but on top of everything else I've had to endure from them - I can't wait to get away from Siteground.
Allsimple.net
Recently a new client on the Isle of Arran told me about the hosting company he was using. He had a site built in Joomla which wasn’t very user friendly to say the least and I was hired to rebuild it. When it came to a discussion about hosting I was asked if I could stay with his existing hosting package with Allsimple.net. Initially I was a cautious because of previous experiences of trying to use hosting companies running unsupported versions of PHP and I told my client of that caveat. In fact Allsimple have everything I could hope for and crucially for me they have a very proactive technical support team who I can easily pick up a phone and talk to.
Allsimple are based in the UK and have servers near London which works for me and most of my clients.
Given the deterioration of services at Siteground I am no longer recommending them to any new clients. If you already have a Siteground package then I can make that work for you by raising a ticket to get a fix applied to allow access to the API but it is frankly absurd that we are in this position.
Cost
The last thing I look at is cost. One would hope that you get what you pay for but sadly that doesn’t seem to be so obvious in the world of hosting companies. At the time of writing this, Allsimple charge £4 a month for a hosting package that will support up to 4 domains/sites. By comparison Siteground charge £1.99 a month for a single site but that rises to a regular £13.99 a month after an unspecified number of months so after the first year you will be looking at approaching £200 a year for your website running costs. This shouldn’t be a deterrent if you are running a profitable business and rely on your website for new and repeat business but could be a nasty shock if you saw the £1.99 headline price and bought on that basis. One could argue I suppose that Siteground, like many larger hosts have resilience due to having many data centres around the world and may be better if you are appealing to a world market. However if you are doing business mainly in the UK then Allsimple is probably as good an option and for a world market we can always use Cloudflare to deploy copies of the site around the world.