How to distinguish a good hosting provider from a bad one

In this article, we will talk about how to distinguish a good hosting provider from a bad one, and what to pay attention to at the stage of familiarization with the service.

Ten most important points

So, let's analyze the most key points that you need to pay attention to when renting a server:

1. The form of ownership of the company. Few people emphasize this, but the company must be officially registered as a PE, LLC, LTD, etc. This is a marker indicating that the guys have been doing their job for more than a year, and that they are serious about their work. And for the services provided, such companies may incur legal liability at the level of the authorized capital or even the seizure of all property. In general, the official registration is a good sign.
2. A functioning office. If only the email details or phone number are indicated on the site, but there is no exact address where the employees are physically located, this may indicate the youth and inexperience of the company. Either they haven't had time yet, or they don't consider it necessary – in the second case, this indicates that the provider is not serious. People who love their work will certainly open an office – this allows them to work more smoothly, unites the team and generally testifies to the seriousness of the company.
3. Tariff packages. A well-known rule works here – there's no such thing as a free lunch. Servers need to be serviced, hardware needs to be updated, working with clients also requires expenses, so a normal VPS/VDS cannot be cheap. Study the market, compare prices and identify the average for the market – this will be the optimum. You should not be led to cheap VPS and hope that your website hosted on such capacities will work fine. At best, you will encounter long downloads and high ping, and at worst, you will also get blacklisted by search engines because of the dark deeds of "neighbors" on the server – this often happens on shared hosting.
4. Date of domain registration. Go to whois and look at when the domain name of the hosting provider was registered. The younger the company is, the more carefully you need to treat it, because it can be both beginners and outright scammers.
5. BL Webmoney. If the provider accepts payment via Webmoney, then by this indicator it is possible to find out approximately how many customers the company has and how successful they are in principle. A good indicator is considered to be BL>100 and higher. The verification of this indicator is carried out by the link passport.webmoney.ru/asp/certview.asp?wmid=XXX , only instead of three x's at the end, you need to substitute the number of the WM identifier.
6. The presence of SSL on the site. This certificate allows you to encrypt data when transferring from the client to the server and back. Thus, even if someone manages to intercept the traffic, they will not be able to decrypt them without the appropriate key. Among other things, switching from HTTP to HTTPS is useful from the point of view of SEO, it allows you to increase the position of the site in search results.
7. Reviews. On the one hand, modern SEO allows you to sprinkle as many positive reviews as you want, and with the proper skill of the author, it is extremely difficult to identify such a fake. And if they are also mixed with real reviews of living people, it becomes completely impossible to figure out where the truth is and where the lie is. But negative reviews should be studied scrupulously because real people most often leave them. Also pay attention to whether the company's representatives respond to reviews, and how their reaction is adequate in principle.
8. Study the "hardware". Try to find out exactly what configurations the hosting provider provides for rent. It is important that the server components are as modern as possible. It is especially important that the data is placed on the SSD or NVMe the drive, as this significantly speeds up the data processing speed.
9. No backups. If the company does not provide an opportunity to create backups of your data, this is a bad sign, since in the event of a malfunction or as a result of hacking, all your data may be destroyed. Backup allows you to roll back to an older version with minimal losses.
10. Bandwidth limitation. If the hosting provider is renting a VPS declares some restrictions – this may negatively affect the work of the site in the future and, as a result, SEO indicators. Good hosting does not provide any limits, so carefully study the provider's policy before entering into a contract.

And remember – it's better to overdo it at the provider search stage than in the future to sort out possible problems that may pop up later on at the most inopportune moment.