I ran a hosting company for years and eventually sold it, so I've been on both sides of the counter: choosing a provider, and being the provider people call at eleven at night. This is what I look at now.
1. Start from what you need, not the price
A corporate site with five hundred visits a month and a shop taking orders every hour don't need the same thing. Before comparing prices, be clear about the technology you use (PHP, Node, static), how much traffic you really have, and whether you expect to grow. And make sure you can move up or down a plan without migrating the whole site.
2. Support is the product
When everything works, all hosts are the same. The difference shows the day something breaks. Before buying, send support a technical question and see how long they take and what they say. If they're slow when selling, imagine when fixing.
And check what language and hours they really cover, not what the pricing page claims.
3. Backups: who, when and how they're restored
"Backups included" means nothing. Ask how often they run, how many days are kept, whether you can download them yourself and, above all, how long a restore takes. And don't rely only on the provider's: keep your own copy somewhere else.
4. Where the servers are
It matters for two reasons: speed (closer to the visitor is better) and law (if you handle European customers' personal data, GDPR will thank you). If your audience is local, a server in your region saves you trouble.
5. How to leave
Nobody checks this on the way in and it's what hurts most later. Before signing, confirm you can download your site and database without asking permission, that the domain is in your name — not the provider's or your agency's — and that there's no lock-in or penalty.
Warning signs
- "Unlimited resources". They don't exist. What exists is small print with the real limit.
- A very low entry price and a renewal four times higher. Always look at the second-year price.
- SSL certificates sold separately. Let's Encrypt has been free for years; charging for it tells you what kind of provider this is.
- An odd proprietary control panel. cPanel, Plesk or anything standard makes leaving easy the day you want to.
Stuck between two options?
Write to [email protected] with what you need and I'll tell you which one I'd pick for your case, with no referral fees involved.