If you have a website, you know the importance of hosting. However, the choice may sometimes be overwhelming. How do you choose the best web hosting for your company?
Picking a web host is not easy, since there are simply too many options out there. Let’s look at the 5 factors that you should seriously consider when choosing web hosting for your website.
Summary
1. Reliability
Your web host should have a 99.5% uptime, or else your website will be down regularly and lose traffic.
2. Cost
You need to make sure you get the best possible hosting for your money.
3. Speed
Speed is important because it affects user experience. If your site is slow, visitors may leave before they’ve had a chance to read what’s on it.
4. Customer Support
Getting help when you’re having problems with your site needs to be as easy as possible.
5. Security and Backups
Your web host should provide backups of your website files in case something goes wrong with your hosting account.
1. What is Reliability
Reliability is an essential factor to consider when choosing a web hosting for your website.
Often, we need to run websites that are critical in nature or have time-sensitive information. You could be running a website for your business or work, or you could be running a blog that has millions of readers.
In both the scenarios, reliability is something that cannot be compromised with. You need to ensure that your website is up and running most of the times.
Uptime is the measure of amount of time that your website stays up and running on the internet. A 100% uptime guarantee ensures that there will be no unscheduled downtime and your website will always be up and running on the internet all the time.
A 99% uptime means that there will be 52 minutes of downtime every week and 524 minutes downtime every year which is quite unacceptable.
So, if you want to ensure your business runs smoothly over the internet, it is important to take these guarantees seriously and sign up with hosts who offer uptime guarantees greater than 99%.
2. Choosing the right plan
How much you pay for web hosting is one of the most important factors to consider. It is one of the biggest considerations when deciding on a web host.
Good web hosts offer a wide variety of price plans, but the cost can range from as low as $5 to as high as $50 per month. If you have a small website, or if you are just starting out, you can probably get by with a cheaper hosting plan.
If your website is already popular, or if your business is growing rapidly, then you may need to pay more for a larger and more powerful server.
3. Speed
The speed at which your site loads is one of the most important factors in retaining visitors. If people have to wait too long for your site to load, they’ll leave.
There are two aspects to speed: server response time and load time. Server response time is the time it takes for a server to respond after a request has been made. Load time is the time it takes for a website to completely load in a browser. Both server response times and load times are essential aspects of hosting speed.
If you have an ecommerce store, then you’re likely aware of how important it is that your online store loads quickly. If your online store doesn’t load quickly, And if the visitors keep leaving because of slow loading times, search engines will take note, pushing you down in rankings and reducing traffic even further, which at the end of the day can result in lost revenue for your business.
4. Customer Support
Just like any other product or service, customer support plays a vital role when it comes to choosing the right web hosting for your website. Every web host claims to offer 24*7 support with live chat and toll-free phone number, but it’s only good on paper. In reality, some of them offer slow and unhelpful support.
For example, if your server is down, even for a few hours, you will lose business and that could mean lost customers and sales. If your host doesn’t respond to your trouble tickets quickly or solve the problem within a reasonable amount of time, you may need to look elsewhere.
If you don’t have enough technical knowledge about how things work behind the scenes and need help in setting up a new site or transferring an existing one, it’s important that the web host provides customer support via channels such as phone, email, live chat etc.
5. Security and Backup
Security and backup are two of the most important features you should consider when choosing a web hosting service.
1) Security
Web hosts handle a tremendous amount of personal information every day. This includes customer names and addresses, email addresses, credit card numbers, bank account information, etc. The web host needs to have security measures in place to protect this information. Information that is not properly protected can be subject to theft or corruption.
A secure web hosting provider should have multiple layers of security in place to ensure the physical safety and security of your website. These include the following:
- Firewalls for your servers
- Antivirus software
- Encrypted connections for data transfer
2) Backup
Your website will rely on servers owned by your web host company. If those servers go down — which happens more often than you might think — your site will go down with them. To protect yourself from this danger, look for a web host with backup services that keep copies of your site’s data in multiple locations so it will be available even if one location goes offline for some reason.
Conclusion
As you can see, it is not simply the cost of web hosting that determines the best service. When looking at multiple factors, you will be able to choose the best possible hosting for your website.
Finding a reliable web host will empower your online business to grow and reach its full potential. Through research and careful consideration, you can find an exceptional host for your needs and budget.
