When we’re rating a U.S or Canadian web host we consider four things: reliability, support, price, and usability. Within these categories are sub-categories related to uptime, the features that are included in your package, services offered from support, and more. Only if a company receives high ratings in all four categories are they considered the best web hosts on the market.
Reliability
What we’re looking for is a host that not only guarantees 99.9% uptime, but can prove it by utilizing state of the art technology in a private data center with backup generators and24/7 security for their software and hardware. We also note the type of moneyback guarantee they offer. The industry standard is 30 days, but many have extended it to 45 days or even 90 days. For more information on this reliability, read through our reliable hosting article.
Support
There are a few things we know that makeup a great customer service operation such as whether they have a customer and technical service team working 24/7/365. In order to get a high rating they need to provide at least three contact options, typically by phone, live chat, a ticket system, an online form and/or by email. If their support is in-house, it’s even better since they’re able to provide better and more efficient service.
Price
Nearly all hosting plans are relatively cheap, with a range in price from $2-$6. People tend to assume that if a plan is cheaper, it has less features, but with shared hosting plans this isn’t necessarily the case. It’s possible to have both a very cheap and very good hosting plan; so what we look for are the features you receive for your price and this usually includes a large amount of bandwidth, disk space, programming tools, simple scripts, sometimes e-commerce tools and a free domain.
User-Friendly
Our user-friendly category is related to how “user-friendly” the hosting company’s services are for the customer. That’s why we consider such issues as whether or not they have an easy-to-use control panel for managing your hosting account as well as additional tools they offer to make your site a success. The most important tool is the inclusion of one-click installation for simple scripts like Joomla, Drupal, WordPress, and b2evolution, which will help you to very quickly build, design, and customize your site.
