Choosing a web hosting provider for your website is vital because it sets the tone for your company’s success. You may enhance and speed up your website with the best web hosting service. But if you make the wrong decision, you’ll incur additional costs and all kinds of hassles.
It is not uncommon for services to lure you based on promises such as unlimited resources, 24/7 technical support, and nearly 100% uptime. But regardless of all the technical jargon, you still need to make a wise choice.
In this article, we’ll look at a few factors to consider when selecting the best web hosting provider for your firm.
But before we delve in, it’s essential to know the basics of web hosting before selecting a web host.
What Is A Web Host?
Web hosting is the physical part of the internet. Every website you view on the internet comprises photos, media, programs, and other items that take up disk space. We often view the web as an entity that lives beyond the physical space. But all that data must be kept someplace on a dedicated server.
A physical server must be robust to store all the data that form your website and provide them to every visitor. Owning and running such a powerful server is impractical for most website owners. Therefore, this is where website hosting services come in.
Web hosts own a vast number of servers with processing features. This is because they aim to offer continuous, dependable service to millions of websites. Once you sign up for a hosting package, you rent a part of the dedicated server.
Hence, a competent web host sells more than just space. Likewise, many sell their competence to ensure their technology functions quickly and securely—so that your website operates smoothly without flaws and glitches.
9 Factors To Consider Before Choosing A Web Hosting Provider
To get all the perks of web hosting, you must pick the best web hosting provider. With so many alternatives available, a beginner may need clarification on how the various providers rank and which aspects are truly the most important to rate each option.
Whatever type of website you’re launching, these are the top nine features to look for in a web hosting provider.
Recognize Your Site’s Requirements
A simple Google search will reveal that there are several web hosts available. However, before even evaluating any, understand the needs of your website.
The first step in selecting the best web hosting provider is determining your website’s requirements. Consider questions like “what kind of website do I want?” “Do I want to use WordPress?” and “What is my expected traffic?”
Such questions may appear simple, but they are crucial. Why?
This is because it will become easy for you to select the ideal hosting service when you are specific. Considering WordPress? Try using a managed WordPress hosting service. Creating an online store? Examine an eCommerce-specific web hosting provider.
Reliability
Your quantity of visitors decreases each time your website shuts down. Losing visitors means losing customers, followers, reputation, and so forth. Even for a short period, your website shouldn’t be offline!
To begin, your host should be able to help you in fast pivoting if your website experiences a surge in traffic. Even so, what good is a brilliant marketing campaign if your site fails because of all the increased traffic?
Typically, your web hosting provider will transition from shared hosting to virtual private server (VPS) hosting without taking your website offline.
Hence, ensure that your web hosting provider is reliable. To confirm if it’s reliable and scalable, consider its overall clients.
Storage Bandwidth
For clarity, the server’s storage refers to the area where the site’s files and information are kept. These files include pictures and videos. The amount required is difficult to estimate when you’re just starting. But it will ultimately depend on the content you upload.
Though most online pages weigh, on average, 2 MB. It is less compared to the amount of disk space most suppliers give. But keep in mind that items like videos, photos and ad banners will become larger with time.
In addition, it pertains to bandwidth usage, which is determined mainly by the amount of traffic. Bandwidth is a website’s monthly data transfer limit. We may classify it into two types: metered and unmetered.
Metered bandwidth limits the amount of traffic a website may produce each month. If that level surpasses, your site may crash, and visitors may not access it. Whereas the unmetered approach does not impose monthly bandwidth use limits. The reason is that the restriction is on the server capacity, which is part of the plan.
Fortunately, this is the most prevalent model used by many web hosts.
Budget
Several web host providers offer their services at variable pricing. In fact, many factors influence these variations in prices. But you should still check other options before settling on one.
However, it’s always best to go with the cheapest deal. That’s only if you’re hosting a small webpage or you don’t expect a lot of constant traffic or bandwidth. Explore more options if you want to host a more complex website.
Refund Policy Or Free Trial
It might be expensive to use a web server. Particularly if you’re starting and don’t have a large budget. That is why a hosting provider with a return policy or free trial period may help lower your expenditures.
With free trials, you may securely test out the web host. Also, you can cancel if it does not meet your website’s demands. And if something goes wrong, selecting a hosting provider with solid refund policies will ensure you don’t lose too much money.
However, some web hosts demand a cancellation fee if you end your account within the trial period. We advise you to stay away from these web hosting service providers. Choose firms that provide money-back guarantees with prorated refunds when your trial time has expired.
Security
Regardless of how you intend to use the web host, ensure it has proper security protections. The best web hosting service typically provides a wide range of security measures. And you’ll need to consider which ones are crucial to you. Note that this consideration must base on the type of website you intend to launch.
Needless to say, the criteria of a personal blog differ significantly from those of an online store. At the very least, ensure you have access to spam prevention technologies. Several options are available, including SpamAssassin, Spam Experts, Spam Hammer, and others.
Furthermore, SSL certificates are necessary these days. The reason is that they help raise your website’s reliability score. What’s more? If you accept financial transactions on your website, you’ll need to look at ways to prevent distributed denial of service (DDoS) assaults.
Uptime
Nothing can be more aggravating on the web than hitting a link and the desired site refusing to load. This issue irritates the user. Not only that, it irritates Google, which begins to assign less significance to that site in organic search results. As a result, ensure that the website hosting provider you choose provides the highest level of availability.
This factor, often known as uptime, may be evaluated. Today, the standard percentage of uptime is 99.95% uptime. Therefore, endeavor to avoid anything less than 99%. Of course, premium accounts will provide superior server stability, with some achieving 99.99% uptime or higher.
Keep this in mind while selecting a website hosting provider and emphasize solutions with uptime greater than 99%. There are several server monitoring tools available to analyze a web host. But in general, a check at their uptime scores is more than enough to determine whether a web host is solid or not.
Customer Support
Customer support is the foundation of any successful business, and the best web hosting services are no exception. As a result, you will want a hosting company with a dependable support system.
Excellent customer service should be available to answer your queries 24 hours a day, seven days a week. So go for a web host provider with adequate customer support. Especially if it provides many ways to get in touch with its customer service representatives.
Finally, you can always look through the feedback to see what others say regarding a web host’s customer service. Also, if you are still in doubt, read through articles with head-to-head comparisons of prominent hosting firms. Doing this might help you narrow your search.
Content Delivery Network (CDN)
A good web hosting provider should lean towards CDN. A CDN, or Content Delivery Network, is a technique for delivering your website’s content to various customers of different regions.
Many CDN operators, such as CloudFront, Akamai, Fastly, and CloudFare, are famous for successfully moving your website’s content to a location closer to the user population you’ve targeted. Consider the long-term advantages!
Yes, there are a few benefits. They include an increase in your website’s traffic since customers won’t experience server crashes when they choose to evaluate the services you provide. Also, it may lead to an improvement in the dependability and security of your web portals. And its promise to lower costs when extending the bandwidth of your existing network. Thanks to CDN’s clever bandwidth-saving techniques.
So, if your web hosting provider agrees to provide CDN as a service, you must rely on it and let your content go around the world faster and with more scalability for your business or related services.
Bonus: Consider A Website Builder
You only need this feature if you have a superb competent web designer in mind for your website. At the same time, ignore it if you have the expertise to handle it yourself. However, an intuitive website builder will make your life much simpler if you are seeking a simple and inexpensive website development solution, regardless of programming expertise.
Final Thoughts
When a web host provider grows too rapidly and needs more resources to keep up, it causes difficulties for business owners or brands. Such challenges may include downtime, poor page loads, lost income, and destructive impacts on search rankings.
Your web host acts as a virtual storefront for your company. So, choose a virtual storefront with care, just as you would a physical one.
Before choosing a web host for your business, consider your needs, and evaluate the features and security.
