Choosing web hosting for your website is an important decision as it is an important foundation for the success of your business. With the right web hosting, you can dramatically improve and boost your website’s performance. Choose the wrong one and you could end up with all sorts of unnecessary headaches and costs. In this article, we will look at some factors to consider when choosing the right web hosting provider for your business.
- Server reliability and uptime
When Amazon was inactive for 30 minutes in 2013, it lost $66,240 in revenue per minute.
Sufficient it to say that keeping your website online is very important and for that you need to look at the stability of your web hosting provider. Many server monitoring tools are available today to track web hosts, but their uptime is usually enough to determine if a web host is stable.
Currently, the industry standard is 99.95% uptime, and anything below 99% should be avoided. Premium accounts, of course, offer better server stability, and some manage 99.99% uptime even better.
- Server upgradeability
These days, hosting plans come in all shapes and sizes, but if you’re just starting out, you’ll likely end up with a shared hosting plan. If you do, you should choose a service provider that allows you to upgrade your server. The reason is that even if you choose a great hosting plan, the available resources are still limited. As your website gets bigger and gets more traffic (30,000+ visitors), your shared hosting plans won’t be enough to provide all your bandwidth. A hosting provider that allows you to upgrade your plan is more profitable than finding a new host and migrating your entire site. If you’re a beginner, here’s a little tip:
VPS or a dedicated server plan offers more server resources when your website performs better than a shared hosting plan. Find a host that can flexibly adapt to the needs of your website.
- Storage and performance
A simple one-page website takes up less space than an e-commerce business. So if your client runs a basic website, you don’t need to spend money on an advanced web hosting plan. When we talk about “performance”, we really mean “speed”. As we mentioned earlier, finding a host that loads websites quickly can provide customers with the best possible user experience.
But overall performance isn`t pretty much speed. It additionally relies upon on different key elements such as:
- Bandwidth
- Server technology
- Scalability
Be certain to test how properly your web website hosting server can cope with the above elements earlier than finalizing your plan.
- Do they have essential features?
While maximum web website hosting organizations provide the entirety you want for a website, you have to continually test to look in the event that they provide different simple functions like one-click on installers, document management, and DNS management. Key installation
One Click Installer is an exquisite device that allows you to put in programs like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, etc. without difficulty. This is in particular beneficial in case you don`t understand the technical elements of internet development. .htaccess document get entry to
If you need to make administrative modifications to the complete site, you’ll be capable of getting entry to the .htaccess document. With it, you may edit and alternate diverse parameters, which include password authentication and administration. FTP/SFTP get entry to
Most web website hosting carriers provide a few shapes of document management, however, the range of such directors has a tendency to be very limited. With FTP/SFTP get entry, you’ll be capable of a secure manner and flow big quantities of documents to your server. Here’s a brief tip in case you’re a beginner:
Initially, you have to forget about disk area and information switch capacity.
The server resources (RAM and processing power) presented through maximum shared web website hosting plans are extra than sufficient for a small website. But in phrases of garage and bandwidth, you may without difficulty use third-birthday birthday celebration systems like Imgur, YouTube, Google Doc, etc. to deal with your photos, videos, and documents.
- Back up for your website
Backups are essential to a website. Even with all the security measures in the world, your website will still encounter some crash, bug, virus, or hack that will destroy your website, or worse, completely destroy it. This is where a good backup strategy comes in handy because if something goes wrong, you can always restore a working site.
A good web hosting provider should be able to restore the entire site (or at least most of it) with very little downtime to avoid major damage. Some key questions you can ask your web host about backups include:
- Do they do regular full backups?
- Can you manually back up the site using the control panel?
- Can you use a program to automatically create website backups?
- Can you restore the backup file myself or do you need a support person to restore it?
You need to ask all these questions to your hosting provider.
- Fast Server Speed and Responsiveness
With Google now considering mobile page speed in its rankings, it’s clear that fast page loads are important for your website and business.
It is recommended that you choose a hosting service provider who can offer stable and fast server speeds to ensure your website loads quickly and smoothly. Not only does this help improve the overall user experience, it can also benefit your SEO rankings. Test your web host’s speed and responsiveness by testing the time to the first byte (TTFB) using tools like Bitcatcha and WebpageTest.
As we close
We would also like to mention some factors like 24/7 quality customer support, pricing, and affordability of plans as per your requirements, and refund & renewal policies for web hosting. If you are scaling from a shared plan to a VPS hosting or even cloud or dedicated, you should know what are the changes that will affect your website and its day-to-day operations if at all. Understand that asking these questions is your basic right and there is no need to shy away from these queries. In case you have any doubts or more questions pertaining to this topic, please feel free to share them with us in the comments section below.