The best reliable hosting company and 12 criteria for choosing the best hosting

Choosing a hosting company is one of the basic steps for a website builder. It can even be said that it is the most important step, because the decision to choose a hosting company directly affects the site and the user experience, whether positively or negatively, as the hosting company can provide the best possible experience for the user in terms of performance and speed. Security and privacy, and the opposite may happen.

When you search in the Google search engine for the best hosting company, you will find hundreds of different companies, or even thousands of companies, and their number is increasing annually, and you will find most of the prices are close, so we have collected for you the 12 most important basic criteria by which you can judge hosting for yourself.

We will also list for you the 4 best hosting companies from our point of view, so that today’s article is a comprehensive guide that you can rely on to determine the best hosting company that suits you in 2021, so continue reading with us.

12 criteria for choosing the best web hosting company

First, we will review for you the criteria upon which you choose the appropriate hosting company. Whether you rely on our recommendation of some companies or not, let us tell you the correct way of thinking based on which you select the appropriate hosting service provider for your site, and let us review the criteria for choosing the best hosting company as follows:

1. Server Uptime

Server uptime is considered the first and most important criteria when choosing a hosting company, and it is usually a percentage, which expresses the number of hours your site server operates during the year.

The server uptime in most hosting companies is greater than 99.5%, and may reach 99.9%, and I do not want you to think that 99.5% is a high percentage, on the contrary, it is a low percentage and this percentage should be the minimum for the hosting companies that you plan to subscribe to, as The rate of 99.9% means that your site may stop working for 1.4 hours per month, and during that period you may lose an important client or customer, simply because if the visitor does not find your site available at this time, he will search for an alternative site immediately.

There are some hosting companies that provide a guarantee on the uptime of the servers. For example, if the percentage of the server uptime drops below 99.5% during a certain month, you have the right to recover a percentage of the hosting cost or get another free month or other financial compensation, and this It is considered evidence of the hosting company’s confidence in its services.

2. Loading time

Website loading time is considered a criterion no less important than the readiness of the server, but it was placed in second place because it is the result of many factors in common with hosting, and it can be improved by some modifications and additions to WordPress.

A good average page loading time is around 450 milliseconds, and it may be relatively more or less depending on the quality of the server and the pressure of clients sharing the same server.

The latest studies from Google indicate that the bounce rate from your site may increase by 32% if the time to load your site takes from 1 to 3 seconds, but if the time to load your site takes from 1 second to 5 seconds, the bounce rate from your site increases by 90%, but if the time to load your site increases Loading your site for 6 seconds may increase the bounce rate from your site to 106%, and if the time for loading your site increases to 10 seconds, the bounce rate from your site will reach 123%, and this indicates the extent of the impact of your site loading time on the user.

Even if the user is satisfied with the slow loading time, the Google search engine today depends mainly on the page loading time in ranking articles, and the bounce rate, if it increases, also negatively affects the ranking of your site in the Google search engine, so if your site is slow, you will lose from all Trends, whether it is the ranking of your site or the customer himself.

There are many methods that you can use to determine the page loading time for any hosting company, and the Pingdom website will help you determine the loading time as well as the readiness of the servers for most hosting companies, by displaying daily, weekly, and monthly reports, so you can study them, analyze them, and compare them between the companies you have chosen.

3. Hosting type

Hosting companies provide many types of hosting with different resources and prices to suit most customers, so you must know the common types of hosting, determine the appropriate type for you, and make sure that the hosting company provides this type, and the common types of hosting are as follows:

Shared Hosting: It is the cheapest type of hosting for all companies. It is a single server shared by many users, consuming the same resources, and therefore the use of one site may affect other sites. It is considered suitable for small and emerging sites. (Read also: The concept of shared hosting and why we do not recommend it to you )
Virtual hosting: “VPS Hosting”: It is the highest stage of shared hosting, where server resources are divided between clients, and virtual limits are set between them, so using one site on another site does not affect the same server, and it can be said that virtual hosting is shared hosting with distributed resources. ( Read also: The concept of VPS and its difference from shared hosting )
Dedicated Hosting : It is considered the most expensive and best type of hosting, as the server resources are completely allocated to your site, and it requires relatively technical experience in managing server resources, and is considered suitable for large sites with a large number of visitors daily.
Cloud Hosting: Cloud hosting can be shared, virtual, or private hosting, but your site is transferred to more than one server in most parts of the world, and sites are opened from the server closest to the visitor, which causes your site’s loading speed to increase exponentially. It is considered the best type in my opinion, and some hosting companies rely on this type of hosting for all their services, while others do not provide this type of hosting at all. ( read more )
WordPress Hosting: WordPress hosting can also be virtual, private, or cloud hosting, but it is managed by the hosting company’s support team so that it is fully suitable for your WordPress site, and provides you with many paid WordPress templates and tools for free with the hosting.
Reseller Hosting: It is the hosting that merchants and hosting service distributors rely on, where server resources or part of it are allocated to a customer, and this customer has the right to divide, manage and distribute the server according to some conditions specified for each hosting plan, for example distribution Hosting resources on 20 clients, 25 clients or 30 clients, and need technical expertise for proper management, maintenance and distribution.

After determining the type of hosting that is appropriate for you, and ensuring that it is available with the hosting company, you must test customer support, which we will explain in the next paragraph, so continue reading with us.

4. Customer support

Customer support is considered an essential point, especially for beginners, because your site is always vulnerable to technical problems and you may need a strong support team to help you solve all site problems quickly and directly.

Therefore, you should look for a hosting company that provides customer support 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and even works on official holidays, and this is common in all major hosting companies.

Hosting companies also provide many ways to communicate with technical support, for example a phone call, email, or live chat, which is the best method in my opinion, and certainly the language of communication will make it much easier for you to communicate with technical support, especially if it is in Arabic.

The best way to test technical support is to communicate with them personally and present to them a problem, for example, the desire to transfer your site to their hosting company, and test the speed of response, the extent of their experience, and their ability to help you.

In short, you should look for the answer to 4 questions for each hosting company as follows:

How to contact technical support?
Timing to contact technical support?
Languages of communication with technical support?
Evaluate the technical support experience personally?

After collecting the answers to these questions, you compare them between all companies to narrow down your choices.

5- Quantity of data transfer “Bandwidth”

The amount of data transfer “Bandwidth”, known as the amount of monthly traffic, means the rate of requesting your site’s data from the hosting server to the client’s browser.

The data transfer rate is related to the consumption and size of your site, and you will not feel it significantly unless you own a large site. Most hosting companies offer an unlimited data transfer rate, and some calculate it by the number of visitors, for example, 200 thousand visitors per month, and others by the transfer size. The monthly data resulting from the number of visitors is as follows:

Data transfer rate = data required for the site x traffic

For example:

If you have a 10KB page with 5 images of 100KB each, the total page size is 10 + 100 x 5 = 0.51MB.
If your site has 1000 visitors per month, the data transfer rate = 0.51 x 1000 = 510 MB.

In this way, you can calculate the appropriate data transfer rate for your site and estimate the plan that suits you with the hosting companies.

6- Limits and type of storage unit

Some hosting companies offer limited storage space ranging from 50 to 300 GB in the basic plans, and if you are using your site in normal use as a startup site, you will often be satisfied with the basic plans that companies provide you.

It should be noted that some companies that tell you to provide unlimited storage space are subject to a fair use policy, which means that the storage space is used to store the files of the site itself only, and not to upload or save files. For example, it is not suitable for file upload sites.

As for the type of storage unit, it directly affects the loading speed of your site, and you will find hosting companies offering two common types, which are as follows:

HDD storage unit
SSD storage unit

An SSD storage unit is considered better than an HDD storage unit, because it is considered 2.5 times faster, and therefore the SSD storage unit is the most expensive.

7- Data security

Most Internet sites are exposed to attacks and hacking attempts on a regular basis , so you must choose a hosting company that provides you with high levels of security, for example the following:

It updates the operating system immediately in order to avoid vulnerabilities that appear periodically.
Install a strong firewall at the server level, which filters malicious traffic.
Providing DDoS protection that helps avoid any potential DDoS attacks on your site.

8- Backup

Backup is keeping all of your site’s data on a private server that you can request at any time when problems occur with your site. This is considered one of the most important criteria for choosing a hosting company, especially if you own a services site or an online store.

The backup rate varies from one hosting company to another, and most often it is a backup rate of once or twice a week for free, or a daily backup copy for a fee.

Also, requesting and installing a backup copy from technical support may not be free in most hosting companies, and you will be charged an additional financial cost for each request and installation process.

Of course, the length of time that the hosting company keeps the backup copy is very important. For example, most companies keep the backup copy for 30 days, and others for a whole year.

In conclusion, you can test this point by searching for the answer to the following questions?

Free backup rate?
Cost of daily backup?
How long does the backup copy last?
The cost of restoring and installing the backup copy?

Then you collect the answers to these questions and compare them between companies to limit your choices to a smaller number of hosting companies.

9- Number and locations of data centers

The location and number of data centers is considered a relatively professional standard, and directly affects the speed of loading the site, as most hosting companies offer one or two data centers, one of which is free and the other at additional costs, but there are some companies that offer more than 5 different data centers for customers, and they are They have the freedom to choose between them.

For example, if you are targeting visitors from the United States of America, you choose the data center closest to the United States of America from the hosting company, and in this way you increase the speed of loading your site for your visitors.

10- Flexibility in dealing with hosting

One of the best features that we look for in hosting companies is flexibility in dealing with the hosting itself, and this is very important, especially for emerging sites and sites whose visitor volume is gradually increasing.

For example, when the number of visitors to your site increases, you increase the monthly data transfer rate, or increase the storage space. Most major companies implement this modification instantly, while others need 12-24 hours in order to apply the modification. A few companies do not allow expansion, but they do Purchase new hosting.

11- Services prices and available payment methods

Services prices should be your last or penultimate criterion, because you should not compare shared hosting with other shared hosting in general.

But all the details of that internal hosting must be compared in terms of storage space, type of storage unit, monthly data transfer rate, and other services such as domain , SSL certificate , number of free IP, and backup rate. Also, the server running time, loading time, and flexibility in dealing with hosting must also be included in the comparison as a value. For a paid amount.

You should not judge the initial hosting price only, as most hosting companies offer a discount of 30% or more to new subscribers, but upon renewal you find the price has increased significantly, so you should rely on the renewal price when comparing between hosting companies because you may depend on the same hosting company. for a long time and are surprised by a high renewal price.

The available payment methods are also very important for most customers, as there is no benefit from all the previous features if you do not find a suitable payment method with which you can purchase hosting, so search for the payment methods available in the hosting companies that you have chosen in order to limit your options to fewer hosting companies.

12- Money back guarantee

The money back guarantee is the final and motivating motivation for you to buy hosting, as it is a guarantee period during which you can get your hosting money back if you do not like the hosting.

The average money-back guarantee period is 30 days, and in some companies it may reach 45 and 60 days, and this indicates the extent of the company’s confidence in its services.

But you should know that the money-back guarantee does not include additional services, even if they are free. For example, if you purchase hosting for a year and come with a free domain and a free SSL certificate, when requesting a refund, the cost of the domain and the SSL certificate will be deducted from the total cost.

The money back guarantee can only be used once, and you must be a new user, but if you are an old user you cannot use this guarantee completely.

In this way, you can limit the hosting companies that you can rely on, and determine the best hosting company suitable for you yourself, and in order to limit the options for you, we will present to you the 4 best hosting companies in 2021 from our point of view, so you can review them and judge them for yourself as well.

The best 4 hosting companies you can rely on

Hosting companies rely on more than one different strategy in pricing plans, but during this paragraph we will present to you 4 of the best hosting companies that rely on the strategy of paying only for what you use of server resources, meaning you can customize the server according to your needs personally, and these are considered the best strategies. Pricing for customers, and it can be said that it requires moderate technical experience in specifying and preparing the server. The most important of these companies are the following:

Digitalocean Company
Linode company
Amazon AWS
Google Cloud Company

1- Digitalocean Hosting

Digital Ocean Hosting is an American company, founded in 2011, which means that it is a modern company, but it has more than a million customers in just 10 years, and this indicates the quality of the services it provides.

All Digital Ocean hosting is built on cloud hosting, and is characterized by great flexibility in modifying server resources.

Digitalocean hosting features

The average hosting uptime during the previous year was 100%, and this is a very excellent uptime rate. It is considered one of the best hosting companies that provides a server uptime rate.
The average hosting speed over the previous year was 270.5 ms and this is also considered a super fast server.

The ability to backup all plans on a daily basis, and maintain the backup percentage for 7 days.
Hosting company Digital Ocean offers a powerful firewall that completely filters out malicious traffic and protects your site.
The ability to allocate server resources very precisely according to your needs, and complete flexibility in modifying server resources.
The ability to customize an SSD Nvme storage unit, which is 3 times faster than an SSD storage unit.
Install WordPress with one click.
Hosting costs are straightforward with no hidden fees.
Multiple payment methods, as you can pay via Visa, MasterCard, or Paypal.

Disadvantages of Digitalocean Hosting

Do not offer a free domain.
They do not offer a free SSL certificate.
Technical support is relatively poor, as you cannot contact support via a phone call or live chat, but you must book a ticket and wait for a response from a customer service representative.
Transferring your site to the hosting company Digitalocean is not free.
You need technical experience when dealing with Digitalocean hosting, especially when you want to install the cPanel control panel, as it requires some programming commands.

2. Linode hosting

Linode Hosting is an American hosting company, founded in 2003 by Christopher Acker, and it generally relies on cloud hosting as well and the Linux operating system.

After a while, Linode gradually became a multinational company, and it had multiple data centers in most parts of the world, in England, Singapore, Germany, and Japan.

It was subjected to security attacks in 2012-2013, which affected the company negatively, but the result of this was that it set up an integrated security system that works to protect your site and all your data with high efficiency. Today, Linode has more than 400,000 customers, and the number is increasing on a daily basis.

Linode hosting features

Average uptime is 99.9%.
Average hosting speed varies depending on the data center, but the highest average is 130 ms.

It has 9 different data centers in the United States of America, Asia, and Europe.
The ability to try hosting for free for 7 days.
Excellent technical support, you can communicate with him via live chat, phone call, or emails.
Multiple payment methods, as you can pay via Visa, MasterCard, or Paypal.

Disadvantages of Linode Hosting

It does not support the use of Windows operating system.
Backup services are not free for all plans.
The cost of managed plans is high.
There is no money back guarantee, as there is a free trial period.

3- Amazon AWS hosting

Amazon AWS “Amazon Web Services” hosting, which is known as Amazon S3, is cloud hosting affiliated with Amazon, and it is storage hosting in general, meaning you can rely on it to store files, images, videos, your website files, and more.

Although Amazon does not specialize in the field of hosting like the other companies on today’s list, Amazon AWS hosting is considered one of the best hosting in 2021 because of Amazon’s certainly successful management and because of many other features that we will discuss with you in the next paragraph.

Amazon AWS hosting features

The average uptime is 99.9%, and the uptime guarantee is a refund of 10% of the monthly hosting amount if the uptime drops below 99.9% but does not drop below 99.0%. If it drops to 99.0%, you have the right to a refund of 30% of the monthly hosting amount.
Hosting automatically adjusts to the storage space and monthly data transfer rate, and thus you do not have to worry about your site visitors at all, but it is also considered one of the disadvantages, as you will see in the disadvantages of hosting in the following paragraph.
Multiple data centers.
The maximum file upload limit on the hosting is 5 TB per file, which is a very high maximum.
Technical support is very strong and effective, as a result of personal experience. I sent an email to technical support due to a problem with pricing services and attached my phone number. After 8 hours, the technical support representative contacted me and took more than 15 minutes to clarify all matters related to pricing and hosting without any He is quite bored, and always offers his services freely during a conversation.
Data stored on Amazon AWS hosting is automatically encrypted on a regular basis.
Providing free trial hosting for new customers, with 5 GB storage space, 15 GB data transfer rate, and certainly few server resources, but it is just free trial hosting to try the server.

Disadvantages of Amazon AWS Hosting

Pricing is not fixed, so you cannot set a monthly budget for your site, which is a disadvantage, especially for emerging sites.
Calculating the cost estimate for Amazon AWS hosting is relatively complex, and may require me to contact technical support by phone in order to understand the details of the cost estimate.
Prices vary depending on your country, i.e. you can find hosting prices in the United States of America half the prices of the hosting company in Egypt.
Installing WordPress requires technical experience, due to the need for some programming commands.
There is no live chat with technical support on the site, and the only way to communicate with technical support is via email.

4- Google Cloud hosting

Google Cloud hosting is generally cloud storage hosting belonging to Google, meaning you can use it to store files or host your website.

It is fully customizable hosting to suit the consumption and use of your site, in terms of storage space, monthly data transfer rate, number of daily working hours, working days during the week, and many other details that work to allocate hosting that exactly matches your site’s consumption.

Google Cloud hosting features

99.99% uptime guarantee. If the uptime drops from 99.99% to 99.95%, you have the right to recover 10% of the monthly hosting cost. If it drops below 99.95%, you have the right to recover 25% of the hosting cost. But if it drops below 95%, you have the right to recover 50% of the monthly hosting cost.
Average server speed is 242.7 ms.
Pay for what you use, where you pay per minute of usage.
Supports installation of Windows and Linux operating systems.
More than 45 data centers around the world.
Encrypt your site data periodically.
Storing your site data on more than one server at the same time to ensure that your site data is restored when any technical problem or hacking of your site occurs.
Providing free trial hosting for 3 months from which you can judge the quality of the server before purchasing, but with limited resources of course.
Multiple payment methods via Visa, MasterCard, Paypal, bank transfer, or American Express account.

Disadvantages of Google Cloud hosting

It does not support one-click installation of WordPress, but it requires some programming commands or technical support.
Contacting technical support is relatively complicated and is only via email.
The pricing interface is also relatively complex and needs some help to determine the monthly server cost.

In this way, we have reached the conclusion of today’s article after we have explained to you the most important criteria that you can rely on in choosing the best web hosting company yourself. We have also presented to you the 4 best hosting companies from our point of view by discussing the most important advantages and disadvantages of each company. If you have a question or inquiry about… A specific point or any hosting company mentioned in the article, do not hesitate to contact us directly via website messages or comment below the article