In India, not many of us know what Webhosting is and how to select a Webhosting company in India suitable for your needs.

Web hosting is the space for storing your website contents on a server so that it can be viewed by anyone connected to the internet.

There are two types of servers one is a windows server, and another is the Linux server, as their name suggests the windows server have windows operating system, while the Linux have Linux operating system installed on it.

In Webhosting arena, Linux is the king, and most of the website are hosted on Linux servers as they are cost-effective and also very stable as compared to a windows server. Also, Linux is a free operating system. One needs to pay license fee to Microsoft for the windows server and also the other software such as database and mail servers have also license fee so it’s very costlier as compared to Linux server.

Web hosting price in India

In India, web hosting price for one website with unlimited space is between Rs.1000/- to Rs.3000/- per year.  If you signup for longer duration like two years and three years you will get more discount.

There are many Webhosting companies in India who charges very less, most of these companies are not reliable as they cannot afford good servers nor they host the servers in a reliable datacenter, as a result, you would face a lot of downtimes and this will hamper your business.

Most of these companies do not have a proper backup system in place so when there is a hardware failure or hard disk crash they are not able to restore your data and you lose all the hard work you had done on the website and this data or work which had lost had taken you years to built and you cannot build it in weeks or months, this is the most important. You should give utmost importance while selecting a Webhosting company.

Free Web hosting in India

There are few web hosting companies offer a free web hosting plan but there is catch they offer free for the first month or will be offering only very limited space such as 10mb and in such a small space you just cannot publish anything and for upgrade they will charge you fees and it will be same and more than a the leading web hosting provider.

AWS Amazon Web Services provide a free tier for one a year but from the next year, they charge you like Rs 1000/- per month for a basic space of 10 gigabytes and 2gb ram and most of the small business find the price too high. In the above plan, they do provide services but its charged over and above this price.

WebServer Location

If your website serves mostly Indian audience then you need to select the server located in India rather than going for foreign servers, as servers hosted in the USA datacenter cost very less as compare to Indian datacenter Server and most of the cheapest web hosting in India have their servers hosted in USA datacenters you should avoid such companies.

All the best web hosting in India offer you space in their servers which are hosted in Indian Datacenters and you should prefer them. When the site is hosted in an Indian Datacenter it will be nearer to your potential audience and so the website will open lightning-fast and that will provide a better user experience and could convert in a sale.

How to check where are the servers located of a Webhosting company?

You can determine the server location by the servers ip, and you will get this for the hosting company.

Once you get the server Ip you need to perform a traceroute to the server from your location.

What is a trace route function?

When you connect to a server, it’s not a direct connection to the server, it goes through multiple routers and then it connects to the server and it is shown on traceroute as hops.

With this command, you will be able to know how long the server is from your location.

Here is an output for a server located in India.

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C:\Users\rshag>tracert webwerks.in

Tracing route to webwerks.in [180.149.240.246]

over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 192.168.1.3

2 1 ms 3 ms 1 ms 27.106.114.38

3 2 ms 1 ms 1 ms 27.106.114.37

4 * * 90 ms 10.10.125.33

5 5 ms 4 ms 5 ms 38-97-87-183.mysipl.com [183.87.97.38]

6 6 ms 6 ms 6 ms 14.142.220.107.static-mumbai.vsnl.net.in [14.142.220.107]

7 7 ms 6 ms 6 ms ww246.smtp.webwerks.in [180.149.240.246]

Trace complete.

=================================================

Here is an output of traceroute for a server located in the USA

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C:\Users\rshag> tracert zipservers.com

Tracing route to zipservers.com [96.47.45.106]

over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 192.168.1.3

2 1 ms 1 ms 1 ms 27.106.114.38

3 2 ms 1 ms 1 ms 27.106.114.37

4 * * * Request timed out.

5 4 ms 5 ms 4 ms 38-97-87-183.mysipl.com [183.87.97.38]

6 * * * Request timed out.

7 6 ms 5 ms 4 ms ix-ae-0-100.tcore1.mlv-mumbai.as6453.net [180.87.38.5]

8 194 ms 194 ms 193 ms if-ae-5-2.tcore1.wyn-marseille.as6453.net [80.231.217.29]

9 199 ms 199 ms 199 ms if-ae-2-2.tcore2.wyn-marseille.as6453.net [80.231.217.2]

10 204 ms 205 ms 206 ms if-ae-9-2.tcore2.l78-london.as6453.net [80.231.200.14]

11 204 ms 206 ms 204 ms if-ae-15-2.tcore2.ldn-london.as6453.net [80.231.131.118]

12 204 ms 204 ms 204 ms if-ae-32-3.tcore2.nto-new-york.as6453.net [80.231.20.107]

13 204 ms 206 ms * if-ae-12-2.tcore1.n75-new-york.as6453.net [66.110.96.5]

14 204 ms 205 ms 208 ms 66.110.96.142

15 210 ms 211 ms 214 ms be-10390-cr02.newyork.ny.ibone.comcast.net [68.86.83.89]

16 206 ms 205 ms 205 ms be-10203-cr01.newark.nj.ibone.comcast.net [68.86.85.185]

17 212 ms 211 ms 209 ms be-10102-cr02.ashburn.va.ibone.comcast.net [68.86.85.161]

18 224 ms 225 ms 224 ms be-10114-cr02.56marietta.ga.ibone.comcast.net [68.86.85.10]

19 257 ms 258 ms 259 ms be-11423-cr01.houston.tx.ibone.comcast.net [68.86.85.22]

20 258 ms 258 ms 258 ms be-12324-cr02.dallas.tx.ibone.comcast.net [68.86.84.110]

21 254 ms 252 ms 252 ms be-12441-pe01.1950stemmons.tx.ibone.comcast.net [68.86.89.206]

22 263 ms 262 ms 261 ms 96-87-8-78-static.hfc.comcastbusiness.net [96.87.8.78]

23 257 ms 257 ms 270 ms border6.ae1-bbnet1.dal006.pnap.net [216.52.191.45]

24 255 ms 255 ms 254 ms dalinf-2.ext1a.dal.pnap.net [216.52.191.194]

25 257 ms 254 ms 259 ms 170.75.253.115

26 254 ms 257 ms 254 ms srv.cp.zipservers.com [96.47.45.106]

Trace complete.

=========================================

Here you can see that USA server is reached by crossing 26 hops and where as the indian server is reached by crossing the 6 hops.

There is another test called ping test, and the ping commands send a packet to the server and provide the output in milliseconds and this time shows how far the server is.

Ping response to a server hosted in Indian datcenter.

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C:\Users\rshag>ping webwerks.in

Pinging webwerks.in [180.149.240.246] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 180.149.240.246: bytes=32 time=8ms TTL=56

Reply from 180.149.240.246: bytes=32 time=9ms TTL=56

Reply from 180.149.240.246: bytes=32 time=7ms TTL=56

Reply from 180.149.240.246: bytes=32 time=8ms TTL=56

Ping statistics for 180.149.240.246:

Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),

Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:

Minimum = 7ms, Maximum = 9ms, Average = 8ms

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Ping response to a server hosted in USA datacenter.

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C:\Users\rshag>ping zipservers.com

Pinging zipservers.com [96.47.45.106] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 96.47.45.106: bytes=32 time=254ms TTL=51

Reply from 96.47.45.106: bytes=32 time=254ms TTL=51

Reply from 96.47.45.106: bytes=32 time=254ms TTL=51

Reply from 96.47.45.106: bytes=32 time=254ms TTL=51

Ping statistics for 96.47.45.106:

Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),

Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:

Minimum = 254ms, Maximum = 254ms, Average = 254ms

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Here you can see that the time taken to reach server located in the USA is very high[ Average = 254ms] and the time taken to reach server located in India much less. [Average = 8ms]

Customer care service.

In today’s world server hardware prices are falling day by day and also most of the topmost datacenter in India provide server colocation centre at very competitive rates, so the costliest part for a Webhosting company is to provide support to their clients and its the most important thing that you must consider while choosing a Webhosting company.

Most of them provide support on live chat, please visit their website and login to chat and ask them questions about their products, you need to perform this several times a day and check their response time, this will give you an idea how efficient they are and how swift they will provide you services.

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