How to find excellent web hosting
Unfortunately, the web hosting market is saturated with overselling, gross misinformation, false promises and insane charges.
This guide gives you easy-to-follow points to look out for and things to check to help you find the best hosting company for your needs.
Some of this guide has some basic checks you can perform online; Other checks are even easier to check.
If you would like us to go through them with you, please book a free 1-2-1 using the button below.
Support – Speed – Security
According to CNET, finding a good web hosting company comes down to what they call “The 3 S’s”.
These stand for Speed, Support and Security. But in In 2023, the majority of mainstream web hosting companies don’t even meet acceptable levels for those 3.
However, there are also thousands upon thousands of fakes claiming to be web hosting companies. Therefore, we have expanded on this to avoid scammers and fakes too.
1. Working telephone number
Does your web hosting company have a real telephone number, and does it actually work? Call them and check it!
We’ve found many that have fake numbers or get answered by automated systems that send you round in circles.
If it’s not answered by a real person, who are they putting first?
2. When can you reach them?
With so many web design agencies now pretending to be web hosting providers, Monday to Friday, 9-5 just isn’t good enough!
You need to know that you can reach your web host any day of the week, and outside of normal business hours as a minimum. If they have no contact hours on their website, they should be avoided!
3. Available contact options
Most corporate web hosting companies will try to put you off contacting them in as many ways as possible.
Sadly, this is also true of many web designers. They want your monthly hosting income but don’t have the time or skill to tackle your web hosting needs. Nor can they keep relaying everything you ask back to the hosting company and then back to you. This is often why so many refuse to provide a phone number.
If the only support method offered is email, this is a huge red flag. Emails get lost, end up in spam folders and have no accountability. they are likely to also be at work, elsewhere.
A great web hosting company will offer you many options to get in touch to suit your choice and times.
Being a zero-barriers, customer-centric company, we offer telephone, live chat, WhatsApp, trackable tickets (live accountability), remote desktop and in-person support.
4. Fake addesses
Fake addresses are a more significant problem because many web hosting companies use fake addresses to try to appear as a London-based company.
They use a .uk website and a London address, so they must be a UK company in London, right? Wrong… It’s effortless to check…
Look for their address. Is it easy to find it and then Google it. Does it appear as a coworking space or virtual address with hundreds or thousands of other companies all sharing that address?
Here’s a good example that several big offshore hosts use:
342,000 companies here: 128 City Road, London EC1V 2NX
5. Acreddited status
When you register a domain name, you plan to invest a lot of money in that domain name, so you need to know it’s safe!
How can you tell if your new intellectual property is in safe hands?
Click here and check your company: Nominet Registrars
6. Instant activations
Many advertise “instant activation” on new orders. This is of course to encourage new customers to sign up so that they can start on their website straight away. Sounds great, right?
Sadly, this also means that spammers and abusers can also start spamming and abusing servers without anybody vetting them to keep them out and ruin your business and search rankings.
It’s wise to avoid any web host offering instant activation.
7. Green Credentials
A great web hosting company will be doing everything possible to avoid using fossil fuels. 100% renewable is what to look for.
At WESH UK, we use 100% clean renewable energy sources both at the data centre and renewable energy sources at our offices.
Our main servers are at Reading South, powered by hydro energy and our offices are powered by British Gas 100% renewable plans.
Planting trees to “offset” damaging usage just doesn’t cut it!
Since day 1, we’ve all worked from home too, so have zero commuting costs and no energy needs for commuting either!
Ask your web host where they get their energy from both for the datacentre and for their offices. This should be an easy question.
8. Blacklisted IP addresses and Servers
Ask your web hosting provider for the IP address of one of their current live servers to check if it is blacklisted. Many will not tell you or give you this information.
What is a blacklisted IP address? An IP address is the internet equivalent of the telephone number of the server that is hosting your website. It’s what your domain name is linked to, so that people can find your website online.
If abused, those IP addresses can end up on any one of over 100+ blacklists. This is often caused by sending spam emails, or poor website and/or server security resulting in multiple websites getting hacked.
Server IP addresses that frequently get blacklisted will also end up with a very poor reputation. This can negatively affect your websites search rankings and email deliverability.
At WESH UK, we dont allow any of our IP addresses to get abused. We put in place preventative measures to avoid deliberate blacklisting and to stop spammers from even trying to abuse our servers.
Since 2000, we have only ever had 2 IP addresses blacklisted. On both occassions, we had these de-listed the same day. This involves paying a large admin fee and proving that the problem has been resolved.
9. Support for your clients.
If you are a web designer or developer, ask your web hosting company “Will you support our clients if anything happens to me/us?”
Website designers and developers often open web hosting accounts on behalf of their clients (You) in order to make your life easier.
Alternatively, they open whats called a Reseller Hosting plan, where they setup their own web hosting plans then resell those to you.
Typically, this creates a very risky single point of failiure for the you, the website owner. However…
WESH UK is the only known web hosting company to offer what we call our Reseller Assurance Programme.
If anything at all happens to your website designer, you can call us directly and still get help and support.
Just look at what hapened with COVID. Sadly many people were taken ill and didnt survive.
If one of those was your web designer, then elsewhere, you would have no access to it and would have lost your entire website.
Web hosting companies will not talk to you if you are not the client. They will simply refer you back to the reseller.
If your website designer sells you resold hosting, then its worth asking them to move it to WESH UK, so that you have the reassurance that they have a national company backing them and you.
10. Free IT Department
WESH UK is the only known web hosting company to offer you your entire IT department for free: any problem, any day.
We provide remote desktop support too. For anything. From buying new computers to fixing existing tech problems.
Ask your web hosting company if they offer remote desktop support to show you how to set up your emails or help you build your website!
Check if they provide IT support for anything else too…
We hope you found our guide helpful and that it will help you avoid poor-quality web hosting companies and unnecessary headaches.
This guide was specific to companies, not web hosting plans.
Our 2nd guide will help you to identify if you have a poor-quality web hosting plan from your provider and what to do about it.
If you would like a 1-2-1 to walk through any of the points raised in this guide, then please click below and pick a time that suits you.
