4. Pick a host with servers in your own country.

Many people often choose to sign up with hosts outside of their country, usually because of price or perhaps the target audience is more remote. However, if your audience is in the same country then it’s often better to select a geographically local service. This will speed up access to your site (fewer servers between your site and its visitors) and may also make customer support easier to deal with, especially when there’s a language barrier.

However, even hosts claiming to be in the same country as yourself may try to save money by placing your site on servers outside of your home land. Make sure to check that this will not be the case as you could end up with an underperforming service.

It’s also a good idea to run a trace rout on the host’s website and or any known sites hosted by them to see how many hops (server jumps) it takes to reach and whether this shows any latency (ms) delays or unreachable servers. The more hops and higher the latency the slower your site will be (having 10 to 12 servers between you and the website is good, though less is always better).

5. Take uptime guarantees with a pinch of salt.

Most uptime guarantees simply aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on, unless supported by a strong Service Level Agreement (SLA), money back guarantee and or refund policy. Many hosts merely use this as a marketing ploy and frequently fail to support the promises.

Likewise, such guarantees do not cover the performance of your site and the definition of uptime can sometimes be interpreted differently from what you might expect (if your site doesn’t load but the server is online then that may still count as ‘uptime’).

6. Don’t take physical memory (RAM) for granted.

Much attention is often paid to CPU power as being one of the most essential and defining aspects of any server, although many would argue that RAM is more important. Most modern CPU’s are capable of delivering a huge amount of pages at any one time, yet in reality a lack of RAM is usually the chief cause of slow loading and sometimes even crashes.

Judging how much RAM you require is not an exact science and every website will be different, but we would recommend getting a server with as much as possible (VPS and Dedicated Servers). It also helps to have an understanding of the hardware/chipset, since some platforms have greater memory bandwidth than others and that can also impact server speed.

In addition, even shared hosting packages have to use an allocation of RAM and it’s worth trying to find out what minimum and maximum amounts (shared hosting RAM allocation is usually dynamic) the host will assign to your virtual space. The more the merrier.

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