What made you select your Hosting Provider?

What was the determining factor that made you select the Hosting provider you are with or you plan to choose?

Cost?
Support?
Company?
Reputation?
Reference or Referral?

 

I build sites and do SEO for clients, so I needed to know which hosts were reliable, affordable and fast, since site speed is an important search engine ranking factor.

I started by only looking at hosts with plans under $30-40 a month, then I found a dozen or two WordPress sites on each of several dozen and ping tested them to see how fast they were.

I took the top 9 and set up accounts on all of them. I installed an exact copy, cloned WordPress install that is heavy with images and plugins and ran apples to apples load time tests on all 9, and then asked some standard support questions to their tech support to see how they responded, and how quickly.

This helped me narrow it down to the four I recommend to my clients - Lightning Base (best for small biz sites), SiteGround (best "cheap" host - go for their $7.95 plan), CloudWays (fastest affordable cloud VPS I found) and Flywheel (best for beginners and designers) - each for different sorts of clients / websites.

 

I chose my current provider due to the reasonable price for the specifications they offer, the money-back guarantee and of course the 24/7/365 support.

 

I can recommend you to try to compare rates, features, compatibility, performance and reliability.

 

I always look for a few things:
1. Reliability
2. Support/Knowledge
3. Price
As the others have said, you get what you pay for really.

 

Look at your current usage and double it at least, triple is even better because coming half way through the month and running out of bandwidth is probable the worst thing you can do for your website, your users will probable desert you, if they see it isn’t online for a day or two.