I had been working as Web Developer for almost 3 years now, and had been involved in projects with varied complexities. Most lately I have to deal with a bad server, but good news was I was able to find a very good alternative for it. I was happy it happened and hence I thought it might be worthy to share some experiences.
Below I am listing at the features for the WordPress web hosting to look after when you are looking for the files to be hosted in any server.
Security
Depending upon server, security level are set differently. The better the level of security the lesser chance of files being overwritten or getting admin access via Brute Forcing.
Other factors such as staying up to date with the latest software and hardware also make server secured. It’s always a good signal when server stays updated with the latest version of phpmyadmin and apache and PHP support.
Speed
Speed is another factor to look at when it comes to server selection. Based on my personal experience I will pay bit more price for better configuration of servers rather than pay less for less bad servers.
Most lately I had been involved in a project where moving to a decent server had increased the speed of the website almost 2 times.
Support
Support is another key factor. It’s always to have good and knowledgeable support team willing to help you out. And also the availability of the support team matters a lot too, as you never know when site will go down.
A single whitespace or a comma can bring the site down. In circumstance like when it’s out of your own hand support team of the server and their availability matters a lot.
One of my personal experience was I had one of my site down, just because unknowingly I had moved a file from a folder to another. Luckily because of a knowledgeable technician my site was live in few minutes.
Backup Strategy
Most of the server I have dealt with does a periodic backup every day. So it does give some room to go back to previous working version if something goes wrong.
Once daily might sound bit too much but periodic backup is always recommended.
One can argue that I had missed out on things like Easy to use Cpanel to make life easy for web developer to create database or add files as needed. But I have intentionally left it out. I had been working with a Service Provider for whom I have to write every time to create a new database, as it’s a part of their Security Policy. But I never mind that as their customer service is pretty good and it just takes an hour or so to get it created.
