There are so many options available for web hosting now that it has become almost as difficult to know how to tell services apart as it is to build a popular and useful website after you’ve made your decision. Analyzing and evaluating web hosts has gone out of favor recently simply due to the fact that most customers of web hosting services now are more concerned with other issues like SEO and analytics.
That said, there are still useful tools that can be used to analyze, evaluate and select a web host based on valuable and measurable criteria. Here are a few to consider.
Where Am I?
One of the best ways to discover popular VPS web hosting services is to pick a site you consider to be an impressive example of what you’d like to build and use a service like Satori’s Who Is Hosting?. Aside from the valuable trending information you can gather, this site can give you a nice list of web hosts you can analyze with other tools later in your search. If you find a site that passes all your tests, you just might be in business!
Who Am I?
If you are trying to determine who is running a particular site and how they are making VPS web hosting look so easy, you will want to make use of a service called Domain Tools. Not only does Domain Tools make security analysis quite easy, they can provide your new web site project with the kind of insight and information you will likely need six months to a year after launch. This is definitely a service and a site not to overlook.
How Do We Get There?
Oftentimes a website’s speed and response times depend more on the network operations center’s network location than they do on the speed of the network or either the client or server connection to the Internet. In addition to the server’s location, the availability and proximity of DNS servers to the network destination can have a dramatic effect on both network latency and server speed. That’s where a company like DNSStuff comes in. The ability to manage both web and e-mail path tracking, DNS availability and both network and trace data rates can bring specific solutions into focus very rapidly and at considerably lower costs than a manual analysis.
How Fast?
The loading speed of your webpages probably became your top priority when you weren’t looking. Google’s search rankings depend heavily on the responsiveness of your website. If your site’s pages are loading slowly, you need to know and you also need to know how to fix the problem as soon as possible. Enter Web Hosting Hero. Aside from the immediate diagnostics, a site like Web Hosting Hero is useful for both integration testing and alternate architecture substitutions as well.
Don’t forget the incredible number of web hosting tools available through Google. Ever since the introduction of Google Web Analytics, the Internet’s largest search engine has been increasing the quality and number of tools made available to webmasters around the world.
There is no faster way to test a web host or a website architecture than to let ten thousand unique users explore it for a few weeks. The information that can be gathered from Google Analytics is incredible. While some might say the service is a little difficult to navigate for beginners, it is definitely worth the time and effort to learn how it works and to employ that knowledge to build and improve the services you plan to offer on your web site.
Aside from the SEO benefits of having tight integration with Google, the insights you can gain from simple substitution testing on your site’s pages will give you the kind of institutional knowledge you won’t be able to buy later at any price. Your audience is unique and your experience developing a website for that audience is also likely to be unique. The ability to use high quality tools and integrate them with your audience analytics service is a powerful combination that is tough to beat, especially considering many of the competing services simply don’t have the user base or the track record to match.