Does your website face frequent downtimes, slow loading speeds?
Well, it’s no brainer such issues would negatively hit your business credibility and thereby the bottom lines as well.
You may not realize that these issues are a direct result of poor hosting services. High performing and reliable web hosting offers good loading speed while minimizing downtimes.
What is Web hosting?
Whether you run an e-commerce store, a business website, or a personal blog, you would need to upload a ton of content to your website. Content including text, images, videos speaks about your brand, your products and services and helps educate customers about your offerings, build trust with them so you make sales and earn revenues.
You need a reliable and secure place to host all your digital content and make them available to anyone visiting your website from anywhere around the clock.
Hosting service providers own data centers or servers that can hold such data, and make it accessible to those visiting your website. Hosting forms the foundation of your online venture, having a strong foundation is crucial to the success of your online projects.
How to select the right hosting company for your online business?
With so many companies offering web hosting services, the decision to select the right company to host your website is a tough one for many online business owners. In addition, the different hosting plans and technologies that are available make the decision making even more confusing.
Well, if you are in a similar situation and confused about selecting the right hosting service, here are the five most important factors you need to consider before signing up with a hosting company.
5 Must-have features of a Web-hosting Service
#1 – Storage
One of the primary reasons to subscribe to a hosting service is to be able to host your content, text, images, and videos as such storage, disk space should be the first criteria you need to evaluate the storage capacity you need and their offering, before selecting a company.
As a start-up or a small company, you may want to go with a few Gigabytes of storage. However, as your site grows, you may need more storage for your content which requires more storage, in which cases few Gigabytes may not be sufficient. You need to choose a company that offers flexible storage plans that can accommodate your growing demands.
Bandwidth is another factor you need to consider. Bandwidth is the amount of data that your hosting company allows you, including your visitors, to upload or download during any month. Once that data limit is reached it may reduce the speed at which uploads and downloads can happen or may charge extra for additional data.
#2 – Uptime
You don’t want to welcome your visitors to frustrating messages such as website unavailable, 401 error, etc. As these technical errors not only turn your visitors away from your website, resulting in loss of customers, sales, revenues but also negatively impacts your business credibility in the long-run.
Such error messages show up if your host experiences frequent downtimes or technical issues. You need a web host service that has the reputation of offering the highest uptime. Check which web hosting company offers highest or maximum uptime, verify their uptime policy, any uptime guarantees, frequency of downtime, etc. before you subscribe to their services.
#3 – Ease to use control panels
It makes your life and managing your business a lot easier if your host offers easy to use interfaces or control panels to manage your website. Control panels with simple interface dashboard that provide ease of navigation, plenty of features, etc., to manage your software installation, updates will save your time and efforts.
For example, cPanel for Linux based servers, and Plesk for windows-based servers are reputed as the most user-friendly cPanels currently.
#4 – Security
Cybersecurity is the primary concern of online businesses today. Hackers use advanced tools, and social engineering to penetrate any website and steal your private and confidential business or even personal information. Such threats could damage your credibility, reputation, and may also lead to legal problems, heavy penalties.
Therefore, you need to carefully evaluate the kind of security tools, prevention, and remedial measures that your hosting service provider offers. You need a web host providers that provide security tools such as anti-virus protection, virus scanning tools, firewalls, intrusion prevention, encryptions tools, SSL security, anti-spam tools, etc.
#5 – Backup
Regular backup of your data is another crucial factor to consider when considering subscribing to a hosting service. It is quite common that businesses lose data for various reasons, which causes a lot of stress or even halts your business temporarily or forever. It would be painful to start building your business from scratch all over again.
You would need a regular backup of your database, and other files so your business continues uninterruptedly. Quality hosting provider saves all your data onto multiple servers’remote servers, as backup and makes such data available when you need it. Check if the hosting provider offers regular backup of your data, emails, files, etc.
Well, the list of factors you need to evaluate before subscribing to a hosting provider is huge, though these are the basic and most important ones. In addition, you may also want to consider factors such as
Additional Factors
#1 – Support
When you take your business online by hosting your website, you intend to operate 24/7. As such your website, an online store needs to be available around the clock to visitors. Make sure your hosting service provider offers expert-level support and troubleshoots issues as quickly as possible, so you do not lose customers.
#2 – Pricing
Well, every buying decisions depends on pricing. You need to avoid hosting services that compromise on quality by offering low prices, but you need affordable pricing with high quality, reliable hosting.
Conclusion
A quality hosting will make running your business easy peasy by taking care of all the technical issues offering managed services, expert technical troubleshooting, latest technologies, additional tools and apps, scalability, etc. Carefully evaluate hosting services companies against your business demands, budget, etc., and subscribe to the one that has a good reputation, reviews, and service offerings.
