[With Recommendations] How to Choose a Web Server You Won't Regret [Stability, Price, Support]

From ACIDHOUSE, INC., this is Tetsuya Ashida.

I sometimes get questions like this from small business owners who are about to open a website.

I want to rent a server to open a website — who should I sign a contract with?

I looked into it a bit, but there are so many that I can't tell them apart. I'd like to know what criteria to use.

This article answers that kind of question.

The criteria are the number of users and a good reputation

Here is my conclusion.

When a small business launches a website, it won't get a huge amount of traffic right from launch.

So, simply put,

Let's dig deeper below.

Points for judging a web server

Simply put, there are four:

Stability

Stability means "always running properly."
It is the state where, whenever customers visit, the site always displays properly, and when they submit an inquiry form, it completes normally.

A server's stability is largely determined by the quality of the server company's service and the specs of the servers provided.

Price

Price alone doesn't tell you much about the quality of service or whether it matches your business, but when launching a website, you can basically start with the entry-level plan (shared server, around 100–200 GB of storage) at about 1,000 yen a month.

By the way, servers around 500 yen a month are, by rule of thumb, "cheap and nasty," so I don't recommend them.

Support

For support, the speed of response to your inquiries and whether you get clear answers are important, but even more than that, it is very important that they promptly publish up-to-date information on maintenance and similar matters.

With widely used web servers, other users sometimes share this kind of information on social media and blogs, so you can catch up there too, but either way, the provider's sense of speed is key.

Ease of use of the management screen

Whether you run your website with an in-house team or outsource it to a partner, it affects operational efficiency, so the ease of use of the management screen is very important.

Those are the four points, but in the end, they lead to this conclusion:

That's what it comes down to.

As an aside, many web server providers let you try them out before signing a full contract.
But unless you have handled lots of web servers or have plenty of operating experience, I think you'll end up just thinking, "Huh, okay."