How do you choose a host?

In the past, I've admitedly gone for price and sales blurb. You probably won't be surprised to hear that it hasn't gone so well, and I've had mixed results to say the least.

I picked my current host after seeking advice on the XenForo customer forums about issues experienced whilst on a previous host. They seemed knowledgable, and quite frustrated at my situation. I felt confident that such problems would be a thing of the past, and in fairness they've been few and far between.

Posted by: Nerdface

In the past, I've admitedly gone for price and sales blurb. You probably won't be surprised to hear that it hasn't gone so well, and I've had mixed results to say the least.

I picked my current host after seeking advice on the XenForo customer forums about issues experienced whilst on a previous host. They seemed knowledgable, and quite frustrated at my situation. I felt confident that such problems would be a thing of the past, and in fairness they've been few and far between.

Haha, I can attest to this one too. I always used to go with the cheapest or with the host of someone I knew through a Forum I was on or something. Let's just say the results were...mixed in a variety of situations haha. Now I just do it via GoDaddy because I know that if i do something a little silly at least I'm able to pop onto a live chat and get it sorted quickly and easily. The times I've had to do that before was simple as pie.

For one thing, it  has to be XF friendly. In other words, emails should go to people no problem.  I had to get off of one hosting because of that.

I read many reviews on the hosting i love to try, browse through webmaster forums for more feedback and choose a host.

I take into account what the purpose of my community will be, if/how I plan to earn money and then research different hosting with this in mind. My current project, my blog, for example, I am using a free plan on Wix as it provides me the option to effectively create a blog while not having to pay anything given the fact I don't have a way to earn money off my blog quite yet.

I would say the support is the main thing that draws me to a host. If the support isn't great, i do not purchase. I like to be helped when needed especially when I am not so techy savvy. The other would be the up-time of the servers.

I look at hosting reviews before I pick my host. I also check to see if support is great, and I look at the price as well. I wish I always did this though, just recently I started looking into support of each potential host to see if their support is top notch. (I recently had a issue with my hosting for one of my projects...)

I'll do my own research look up reviews and see if anyone is actively using the hosting. Usually that will net me a good hosting.

I look at so many things before settling on a host. Pricing is an important one. That's probably the first thing I look at. If it's reasonable, I'll keep looking. I check to see if they offer ftp, php, cpanel access, etc. If they do, I keep looking. I would also like to be able to move existing sites to the server but this isn't at the top of my list. I also take the time to read reviews to see how they deal with customers and typical problems that they run into.