Best Web Host Singapore in 2023

Server Location

You’ll have noticed some websites load quickly while others take forever.

Several factors can affect this, including how much media is on the page you’re trying to access (our recommendation is to be sensitive to the size of images on your posts). 

Having a slow-loading website negatively impacts your SEO (Search engine optimization), making the website harder to find on search engines.

Needless to say, you’ll want optimum conditions when deciding on your host.

Another factor affecting your website is the server location.

This describes the location of the data center where your website’s being hosted. No matter where you are in the world, a data center can typically be accessed by your website (it might be located on the side of the world).

How Server Location Affects Loading Speed

To answer the question of whether your server location affects your website’s performance - absolutely! Specifically, it can limit loading speeds (how long it takes for pages to fully load). 

If you’re running a busy website, such as for eCommerce with an online shop - say - you should seriously consider the location of your customer base.

If your audience is primarily the Singapore market, for instance, being hosted on a US or UK server increases how much distance there is, geographically, between that server and customers trying to access information being processed by it.

It's a wise move to choose a host with servers nearest to your customer base (while still being reputable) so that latency is minimized.

What If I Can’t Find a Server in My City, or Even Country?

The first step is to close the distance, so choose the optimally-located one. Second, remember you can tweak your hosting type.

It may be a wise move, for example, to jump up a step from a shared hosting to VPS hosting if your best location possible isn’t optimal. In our opinion, VPS is the minimum a website should go for in order to generate competitive SEO.

Storage

To streamline loading speeds, you’ll want to target storage metrics as well. Busy websites like eCom stores have a hell of a lot of information that needs to be retrieved before a customer can access the page.

To get around this, content delivery systems cut time-costs down:

#1 A General Content Delivery Network or CDN

This is a network of servers spaced-out around strategic geographical locations. These store content as ‘caches’ and are one of the most crucial ways of boosting your loading speeds.

Rather than the host having to process all of the content files associated with your pages, these files are already loaded (in locations near to you, waiting to be drawn out) and just need to be transmitted.

#2 Amazon S3

This content delivery type let's input/output data sets become quickly retrievable.

#3 Cloudfront

This web service lets you speed up how fast active and inert content can be distributed to clients, such as PHP & HTML files.

#4 Amazon EBS

Short for Amazon Elastic Block Store, this uses block storage processes related to AWS. The system handles the storage of ‘persistent data’, for quick retrieval.

#5 Amazon Glacier

Not related to any glacial speed of retrievals, this is there to handle infrequently-used data.

Bandwidth

Quite simply, the more bandwidth you have, the more data can be transferred in a shorter space of time. Which means,  quicker your website loads! 

Most notorious for having restricted bandwidth are ‘shared web hosting’ plans.

Shared plans have multiple users with websites occupying the same space inside of a single server. The host typically tries to evenly distribute bandwidth evenly to each website.

But during periods of high traffic, you may find that your website throttled: because your website is struggling to access the bandwidth it needs to access to meet its demands, customers may experience slow loading (which is bad for conversions, according to meta-analyst sources like KissMetrics).

What Are My Bandwidth Options?

If starting out newly, then bandwidth should not be too much of an issue. But as your traffic increases, you’ll want to steer clear of hosts who limit your bandwidth - and upgrade to a VPS at minimum.

In worst-case scenarios, low-bandwidth can lead to your website being completely unavailable to visitors!

Uptime & Speed

Uptime means that the web server hosting your website is working without any failures. The greater the degree or percentage of uptime you have, this is an indication of the quality of your web host.

If you have downtime, this means your website is not available (and perhaps it was loading slowly for a longer period running up to that failure.)

You’ll typically see uptimes given as a high percentage, as 99.9% or 99%. Either may seem very good, but remember that 1% downtime is roughly the equivalent of 7.2 hours per month where your website is not available!

We recommend only choosing Singapore’s best web hosts with an uptime of at least 99.4%, although 99.8%-and-up is preferable.

What I Should Know About Speed

Your website’s loading speed is incredibly dependent on the quality of service offered by your web host - and the plan type that you have chosen.

The more powerful your plan type, the faster the remote computers, the quicker your visitors can access pages on it. In other words, the web host and plan type you choose is crucial.

A web server runs thousands of interlinked codes just to load a single web page. This takes time and processing power. Websites with a lot of information but weak hosts or plan types may take forever to load, which hurts your site immensely. 

That said, if you have a small amount of traffic monthly come out you probably do not need a lot of power yet. Keep an eye on these:

#1 Dedicated & VPS Plans

These work in similar ways. Dedicated plans give you a server just for your website alone, while virtual private servers are a much more affordable option that partitions off a segment of a server only for your website. 

#2 Solid State Hard Drives

Check whether your plan runs on solid-state drives. This will load faster than traditional hard drives, indicative of superior performance. 

#3 Resource Enhancements

Will vary depending on the web host and plan. Look for enhanced memory, processing power boons: these could boost the speed of your website, allowing more interrelated requests to be executed in a short space of time.

SSL Certificates Explained

Have you ever tried to access a website and had a warning message that it might not be secure? In some cases, the browser refuses to load the page, giving you NO option to view the content. 

SSL stands for “secure socket layer”. Using this technology, your website can establish a secure session link with the visitor’s web browser. The SSL certificate runs via a digital computer file or piece of code, doing these two things:

Data encryption: SSL certificates encrypt sensitive data exchanged from the website to your browser, massively reducing how easy it would be for a snoop to intercept that information - or to create a DDoS attack on your session.

Authentication/verification: Think of this as an ID badge. When your browser accesses a website, if it has an SSL certificate, it can check and verify identities. Browsers typically display the trusted padlock symbol, if the browser determines the SSL has validated your session. 

Some web hosts give SSLs for free (the best domain registrars handle this before you even reach the web host stage), while some make you pay extras. Make sure to check first. Either way, it’s an absolute must for the best Singapore web hosting!

Related Read: What is an SSL Certificate

Support

The size of the web host doesn't always indicate the quality of its customer service. Some people prefer smaller providers like SiteGuard, as they may take more care to look after customers - while others have had bad experiences with the goliaths like GoDaddy.

We recommend making sure the host you choose offers live chat, preferably 24/7, 365.  It’s immensely useful for a range of reasons:

• Access live chat when setting up your website
• Gets your website builder recovered if an update crashes it
• Talk to an expert when a highly technical error comes up

In some cases, the support team will actually handle the execution of these stages for you. Simply ask them to set up what you need from their end (there are limits here, of course - don't ask for them to design your website!)

You would think a contact phone line would be the optimal way to get support, but oftentimes live chat is much more streamlined and fast.

Backups

It's incredibly important that your website is backed up regularly. If you can automate the process with something like Amazon S3, this is ideal as no-slip on your part will cause essential information to be lost.

We’ve previously mentioned drag-and-drop free site builders, as these can create and design websites very quickly. But even in this case, you'll be losing out on archives, posts, and more data that might take forever to build up again.

The good news is that it's free in most instances to get a standard backup solution. For example, you can find free backup plugins for WordPress hosting Singapore.

Reasons a backup can be necessary:

• Malware and other side of criminal issues can invisibly interfere with critical files
• Human errors such as erroneous deletions
• Updating the OS, the website or other features/plugins can crash your entire website (Even professional developers go through this issue!)

Look for backup plugins that automate the process, keeping records of your website for several months at a time (archiving). A Singapore best web hosting company might not have this, but your CMS should - at the very least.

Number of Domains/Sites & Subdomains Allowed

Typically, you should only use a subdomain if you have a good reason. For instance, subdomains can help you rank better for specific keywords, target a specific audience/geographic location, or offer a different language - than your main website. 

• Subdomains look like blog.yoursite.com
• Domains look like yoursite.com
• Subdirectories look like yoursite.com/blog

In other words, subdomains and domains are recognized as separate websites. You always think that may give you a limit for the number of subdomains, and non-premium plans almost always limit the number of domains.

Subdirectories should be unlimited (which makes them a convenient way to expand your website: About, Contact, Blog pages, and so on). Subdirectories will be recognized by Google and other search engines as something falling under your primary website/domain. 

What Should I Choose?

Most people are most concerned with the domain (as subdirectories are usually unlimited). If you want more than one URL address with a single hosting plan, check the limitations of your chosen package.

Most shared hosting plans only allow you to host one domain. If you have more than one distinct product, you may get that value with a plan that gives more than one domain.  Keep in mind that multiple busy sites may struggle to have good performance when competing for bandwidth under only one non-premium plan.

If you’re a start-up, small business, or blogger, subdirectories will help you or website to rank up faster and more simply than using a subdomain - which requires you to invest more time and resources.

Overall, your best web hosting Singapore choice will depend on which of the above you need.