How to choose web hosting? It depends on three things: what kind of website you have, how much traffic you expect and how important it is for your business that it never goes down. With a good hosting provider and a domain, a business gets an online presence without hiring technical staff or buying equipment, because the professionals take care of the technical side.
A website is often a business's first contact with a potential customer. So choosing a provider is a long-term partnership that needs serious research, because the market is full of options and promises. Konet has been providing web hosting since 1999, and in this guide we set out what we look at ourselves when we assess a provider. If you are not sure exactly what you are buying, start with what web hosting is and how it works.
Which web hosting for a company site, blog and online shop
Which web hosting you need for a company site, blog or online shop depends first on the type of website, and then on traffic and the number of products. The table shows where to start in most cases:
| Type of website | What it needs | Where to start |
|---|---|---|
| Company site, blog, portfolio | Stability, email on your domain, backups | Web Hosting |
| Small online shop with few products | More RAM and CPU, caching, frequent backups | A larger Web Hosting plan |
| Online shop with traffic or many products | Dedicated resources and high I/O limits | Semi Dedicated Hosting |
| Agency or developer with client sites | A separate cPanel for each client | Reseller Hosting |
| Application, Docker or your own software | Full root access | VPS Hosting |
Shared web hosting is the cheapest option for a small website or personal blog, but the server's resources are shared with other accounts. For websites with traffic, online shops and professionals, semi dedicated gives you dedicated resources such as RAM and CPU cores. When you need something even more flexible is explained in what a VPS is and when you need one.
10 criteria for choosing web hosting
The 10 criteria for choosing web hosting below are what separate a provider that will serve you for years from one you will leave at the first difficulty.
1. Uptime
A link that does not open frustrates the visitor, and a website that goes down often also loses Google's trust. No provider can guarantee 100% availability, so what you check is whether the provider monitors its servers continuously and how fast it reacts. At Konet every hosting plan is monitored by Konet Monitoring.
2. Security
Data security is one of the most critical criteria, because attacks are not only aimed at large companies. According to Patchstack, 11,334 new vulnerabilities were found in the WordPress ecosystem during 2025, 91% of them in plugins, and the most targeted ones began to be exploited within a median of 5 hours. A small business cannot deal with that on its own.
The provider must have up-to-date infrastructure, an application-level firewall, continuous malware scanning and isolation of each account from the rest. On our servers this is done with Imunify360 and CloudLinux, so a compromised website cannot reach the files of others.
3. Backups
Any website can go down because of a developer mistake, a failure or a malicious act, and most of the time it is easier to restore a working version than to repair the damage. Yet many people do not know what backups they have until the day they need them.
Ask three things: how often they are taken, how far back they are kept and whether you can restore them yourself. We take a backup every 2 hours with 24 restore points, which you restore from cPanel with JetBackup, and we keep two more independent backup levels, one of them in another country.
4. Customer support
Beyond the technical specifications, support and the relationship you build with the provider are often the most decisive factor. Support must be fast, but above all it must be effective, because a quick reply that does not solve the problem does not help you. Ask whether a technician or a call centre answers you, and in which language.
5. Speed and hardware
Google states that Core Web Vitals are used by its ranking systems, and in practice speed decides whether a visitor stays or leaves. Speed also depends on whoever builds the website, as large images, many plugins or badly written code slow a site down however good the provider is.
On the provider's side, the processor, the disk type and the web server matter. Ask your provider which processor model runs your website. We publish it: our customers' websites run on servers with two AMD EPYC 9334 processors, DDR5 ECC memory, enterprise NVMe disks and LiteSpeed Enterprise. If you want to compare providers with measurements, first read how to read hosting benchmarks.
6. Resource limits and "unlimited"
Offers of "unlimited" space and traffic, so-called unlimited hosting, are often restricted by the terms of use, which allow the provider to reduce performance or take the website down after a certain point. Old processors, little RAM and slow disks also degrade a website even with low traffic. That is why you should read all the technical specifications, and especially the small print.
There is no server with infinite resources, so when a plan says unlimited, the limits exist but are not published. In our plans every CPU, RAM and I/O limit is written down, enforced by CloudLinux, and you can watch usage live in cPanel Resource Usage.
7. Scalability
Some businesses need resources that change with demand. For example, a shop with a seasonal peak of thousands of orders within a few weeks needs a provider that gives it more resources immediately. Ask whether you can upgrade your plan without moving the website, and what the next step is when you outgrow the largest plan.
8. Price and renewal
Price should not be the only criterion, because in general you get what you pay for. First understand your real needs and then choose a plan. Look at the renewal price and not only the first-year price, whether the price includes VAT, and what the plan includes, such as SSL, backups, email and moving your website. If the provider offers a trial or a money-back guarantee, read the terms before relying on it.
9. Data centre location
Server location affects speed for your visitors, and Google states that it is a signal about a site's audience but not a definitive one. More important than distance is the quality of the data centre: backup power, multiple connections and certifications. Our servers are in a Tier III data centre in Frankfurt with ISO 27001, SOC 2 and PCI DSS certifications, at Europe's largest interconnection hub.
10. The company behind the hosting
Choosing a provider is a partnership of years, so who is behind the hosting matters too. Check how long the company has really existed, which you can see from the whois of its domain and its history in the Internet Archive. It also matters whether it is a domain registrar, so you can keep your domain and hosting with one provider. Konet has been in web hosting since 1999 and an EETT-licensed .gr registrar since 2004, and you are welcome to check that for us too.
Best web hosting in Greece, how to compare providers
The best web hosting in Greece does not exist in general; there is the best for your website. Many lists of the "best" providers state themselves that they have commercial partnerships with those they recommend, while others run their measurements in data centres outside Europe or rely only on review scores. They are useful for a first impression, but they do not replace your own comparison.
To compare two or three providers, send them all the same questions and compare the answers:
- Which processor model and which disks does the server my website will be on have?
- What are the plan's CPU, RAM and I/O limits, in numbers?
- How often are backups taken, how far back are they kept and can I restore them myself?
- Which data centre are the servers in and what certifications does it have?
- What is the renewal price including VAT?
- Who answers support requests, and how quickly?
The provider that answers all of them with numbers and names is usually also the one that will answer you properly when something goes wrong.
Greek hosting or foreign hosting
Greek hosting or foreign hosting is first of all a choice of company and then a choice of server location. With a Greek company you talk to support in Greek, get an invoice with your VAT number for your business and pay in ways you already use, such as bank transfer and IRIS, while for .gr domains you have a direct registrar.
Server location is a separate matter. A Greek provider can have its servers in a European data centre, as we do in Frankfurt, and a foreign one can have servers close to Greece. What matters in the end is the speed your visitors see and the quality of the infrastructure. You will find our payment options in payment methods and automation at Konet.
Choosing is not hard when you know what you need, and providers build plans for different customer profiles. If you have a question this article does not cover, send us a support request and a technician will answer.
This article is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). You may republish it, provided you credit Konet as the source with a link to this article.
