Resources, Resources, Resources
When choosing a web hosting provider, there’s a lot to take into consideration. Most companies talk about their uptime and use other bullshit buzzwords to sell you on their service. Here’s what you need to know: IO (IOPS), SSD Drives, System specs?, Cloud Based?, Bandwidth limits, database limits, cPanel access? Does email cost extra? This is just a taste of the questions I threw at the team at HostXNow when I was searching for a new web hosting company.
Now, you might think that’s a lot of technical questions, and you may or may not understand all of it, and that’s okay. Here’s what matters. Performance. Those are the pieces of the web hosting puzzle that make up your site’s performance.
IO (or IOPS) is the essentially the amount of data that can be transferred per second on your website. Most companies limit each account to 1 or 2 megs (more expensive accounts up to 10 megs). HostXNow has most of their accounts set to at least 50 megs!!! What does this mean for you? Let’s say you’re hosting a WordPress website (like this one) and you have multiple users viewing the site at the same time. Every person using the site increases the bandwidth and IO and database usage at the same time. If you’re limited to 1 or 2 megs, you’ll reach your server limits very quickly. That will cause your site to run very slowly, or stop all together, potentially causing server errors (this happened to me all the time on that famous race car driver’s favorite hosting company).