Who operates a commercial site or has a lot of traffic on the site, must absolutely pay attention to the performance of his hosting. Several very different factors play a role in this.
The most important thing: Accessibility
Accessibility is the factor most people instinctively look at. No hoster can achieve 100 % accessibility – but most of them come more or less close to this ideal. However, the differences can still be considerable. While the top hosters make it in tests for downtimes, which only amount to a few minutes per month, the downtimes of others can add up to an hour or more.
Decisive factor: loading time of your website
Another factor that should not be underestimated is the loading time: Especially for webshops, the loading time is one of the most important criteria, which also significantly influences the conversion rate. You should not only pay attention to the “maximum” loading time, but also to the percentage of calls that are slower. It’s not always as fast as an arrow – all hosters have a certain number of rather sluggish calls, but the percentage varies greatly. This is due to different caching mechanisms used by the individual hosters. Ideally, the caching should also be configured so that it does not have to be shared with other users of the server.
Fast servers – the crucial resource
The available resources are also an important factor. Good hosters almost always guarantee certain CPU and RAM resources, which are always available. This should also be a bit scalable (e.g. by choosing a higher tariff level if you want more guaranteed performance). Unfortunately, this is not the case with all webhosters, usually there is only more storage space but not more performance with more expensive tariffs.
Service & prices – what you should pay attention to with the Hoster
Today, there are hardly any differences between good hosters when it comes to the scope of functions – important functions such as unlimited and high-quality SSL certificates, databases and cron jobs can be found in almost all professional tariffs of quality hosters.
Of course, the price also plays a role in the end – but it should always be used as the last selection criterion. The performance of a hosting is much more important and a higher performance in most cases makes up for the additional costs of a few Euros.
Depending on your knowledge of the internet, special offers such as homepage construction kits are interesting, with which you can create your website relatively quickly. You can find out how this works and which web construction kits are especially recommended in our article Homepage Construction Kit Comparison: The best web construction kits for founders tested.
- And not to be despised is the support that a hoster offers. How easy is it to reach a service employee in an emergency? How well trained are the telephone operators? Especially the big providers have a lot of catching up to do and you might be better off with a smaller but more dedicated hoster.
- Interestingly enough, the well-known hosters who advertise with high performance are often more or less clearly below the performance values of these top hosters in almost all important areas and are almost always even more expensive.
- A hoster, where the most frequented sites are hosted in Germany, has to be paid much more expensive and does not offer a convincing service – the SSL certificates offered by Symantec will not even be recognized by Google in the near future – which leads to customers getting a hint to a non-secure site.
As our comparison shows, you shouldn’t choose by reputation or brand name – what many people use and what everyone knows from advertising isn’t always the best. What counts in the end is above all real performance – the webhosters mentioned above are really good at it.
