Are you looking for the best web hosting service to match up with your online business? We understand how strenuous it is to find the most reliable company, when there are numerous options available in the market.
Hosting is the crucial step for the success of your online venture – whether it is a personal blog or a corporate website. Choosing a hosting service is the most important decision that take in order to achieve a fully-functional website. It is essential to choose the right host for website otherwise all your hard work could be wasted, or lost.
The Importance of Choosing the Right Web Hosting
Selection of the right hosting company is extremely critical to the success of any online business. It will have a direct impact on your website’s performance. By hiring a good hosting service, you will ensure that your website will always be available to users, and will have an excellent performance, for example in terms of loading speed.
“It may seem unfair, but a well-built site may be harmed if site is hosted on low-quality hosting.”
Imagine that the hosting you’ve hired is unavailable, slow or has some technical problems. This will hurt your website traffic severely because visitors won’t be able to access it. Depending on the type of the problem, you may also have to compromise with SEO ranking of website or positioning of website in search engines, like Google; therefore it is important to choose the right web hosting company for your website.
There are so many web hosting sites, but how to make sure that you choose the one with the best reputation? Here are some points that can help you go in the right direction in this regard.
Some Key Factors for Choosing the Hosting Company
#1. Define your Needs
Before choosing a web host, you better understand what you want first. Do you want one website where you can make tests or provide some content to friends and family or want to start your business? Free web hosts can be a good choice for testing purpose, but you’ll probably need something more if you want to make money online.
#2. Qualifying Resources
First you must know consumption as per resources to determine which hosting provider can offer the desired plan. The determining factors usually are disk space, bandwidth and number of sites hosted. Despite being heavily criticized, the unlimited hosting is a great solution for any business, because most of the people do not know resource consumption
#3. Check Reputation
After choosing the hosting company you have to check the reputation of the web hosting provider. Reputation is the prime factor to be considered. It is not appreciable to hire a web hosting service of any company, which has bad online reputation. Go through forums, blogs, reviews and try to search for user complains, if any.
- Does the hosting provider has vast experience?
- Does the company have a large portfolio of satisfied customers?
- Does the company have a history of complaints?
- Does the company have a physical office?
All these things need to be analyzed before going to the next step.
#4. Usability
You should always check the usability of the hosting service. If you are new to web hosting and don’t understand coding or technical things then you might face some difficulties in the beginning.
There are few factors such as installing WordPress, email setup, data management etc., which are crucial for usability of any website. cPanel or Plesk will make these tasks easier for you. Website customization would become easier if your hosting company provides cPanel. This will allow you to easily set up your website even if you don’t have the required understanding of FTP (file transfer protocol).
#5. Storage and Disk Space
The disk space refers to the amount of space available on the hosting server to store the content of your site. This includes the pages of your site, as well as images, videos, music, downloadable files, databases and all other content that you are having on the domain.
The storage of a website hosting space is nothing more than the space limit you will be assigned to store your files, and how much traffic you will be able to receive each month. Most hosting companies say that the space is unlimited, but it never is. So be careful!
#6. Web Traffic
Traffic is the volume of information exchanged between your site and the server where the site is hosted. When people visit site, they may download pages and images on their computer, through browsers. The traffic measures both the download and upload activities.
This means that a site with many pages and images will consume more bandwidth traffic than a site with a few pages and content, even if both receive the same number of visits. For the same reason, consider the traffic allowed per month by the hosting company, after all with the growth of your site, this issue will get more crucial.
#7. Availability (uptime server)
Availability is a key factor, so make sure the hosting company offers Uptime (server availability of air time) greater than 99%. The best hosting sites offer this guarantee, and then also check what other options they offer in case of unavailability.
#8. Customer support
It is essential to stay in touch with the hosting company whenever you need. So check if it offers customer support 24/7, and the service channels meet your needs. The best companies will offer support by phone, online chat and e-mail.
#9. Site Backup
This is the most important thing that you have to consider while choosing the right server for website. There are many hackers and web spammers in IT world,and more than 30k websites are getting hacked every day. It might happen with your website also. So, be careful and check whether your hosting company is offering regular backups. If your host provide this feature, then you don’t have to worry.
Few things that you have to check…
- Does your hosting company provide backups regularly?
- Backups through control panel?
- Auto backup option?
- Support for backup?
As we can see, there are some important factors which should be considered before choosing a hosting company. So, research enough on the subject before opting for any particular hosting services.
