When you’re a budding creative business it is extremely important to have a website that is increasingly benefiting you and helping you in communicating in a most efficient and heard manner.
Like most things, deciding on which web hosting service to choose to ensure the success and prioritize the success of your website and brand is an extremely difficult choice and one has to be thoughtful of what they decide upon because, with the helping hand of a good and beneficial web hosting service, it can greatly benefit the performance of your website and the overall achievement of your business.
If your business doesn’t appear on the search engine results page, especially on the first page it will be difficult for potential clients or customers to find you. In other words, no clients, no money. Hence choosing a web hosting site wisely is extremely important.
It’s extremely important to know that your website needs to be efficient as your web host. You should get a top-line host that will give you all the services that you want and much more at an affordable price that is also guaranteed to safeguard your website.
How to Choose a Web Hosting Service for your Web Project
The very first step in making your presence known in the wide spectrum of online marketing and business, it’s important to find a reliable and affordable web hosting company, a company that will help you store all your websites data. With such services, it will be quick for your website to deliver all the needful deliveries to your customers’ browsers.
While making the right decision is important, what is more, important is to look into the factors that you are expecting and the areas in which you want your website to grow.
Web hosting services offers may vary, from amounts of monthly data transfers, storage, and email along with other features. Even when you pay, be it month-to-month payment or yearly payment can be extremely different so taking the time to plot exactly what a company needs for online success is essential.
Before going forward and reading further into what kind of web hosting site you want, you need to know what your company and your business need so that you can jot down all the necessities that you require from a side company that you are planning to invest in.
Here are a few things you should keep in mind before choosing the right web hosting co for your website or blog.
- Do you need to add some special software to run your blog?
- What traffic levels are you expecting shortly?
- Are you expecting a Linux or Windows application?
- Are you producing an E-Commerce blog or content publishing blog?
- Are you using something common using CMS like WordPress or custom-made?
These are the necessities of the questions that you will need to answer before anything. Once you’re clear with what you want, here are some important factors to consider while choosing a web hosting company.
Server Reliability/ Uptime Scores
When the server of a business goes down for even a few minutes, it costs them almost half the revenue they make.
Staying online is extremely important for your website, to say the least. To do that, you need to check how stable the reliability credits are of your web host.
With new technology, there are plenty of server monitoring tools that can help you to keep a track of your website but generally, it is important to look up their uptime scores and check if it is more stable enough to invest in to run your website.
The company standards today are 99.95% uptime and anything below 99% should be seen as a red flag. With a web hosting company that operates on a powerful server and a very stable network connection, it is guaranteed that your site will never go down.
24/7 Customer Service
Customer service is one of the most vital features of a web hosting company, especially if you are a new web hosting company.
It doesn’t matter how much you know and how well equipped you are with information and knowledge you will be needing some kind of technical support in order to build and operate your website.
With new customers, a lot of questions arise that need to be answered immediately for the benefit of your websites as well as for keeping your customers pleased at all times.
When such situations happen, you need to have technical support available 24 hours a day and 7 days a week. If you choose a good web hosting company, it will help you in multiple ways to get good support.
For any business, customer service is the most vital organ of any website or company that is running or has started. It does not matter how old or new you are, you have to keep your customers pleased with your services and answering their queries as soon as possible is the best way to please them.
Storage Space and Bandwidth
Secondly, it is a wide choice to consider, while choosing a web hosting service, the amount of base and space storage that it is going to offer in order to store the entirety of your database, along with different files and media.
The smaller the website is, the lesser will be the disc space that you need and vice versa.
A few gigabytes of storage space will be enough for a small and medium website, thus the size of a website decides the importance of this feature. So, make sure that you have ample amount of space to store the data of your website while choosing a web hosting company.
Bandwidth is the amount of data that your host will let you and your visitors upload and download in a given period.
What this means is that if your website is 1 megabyte of data and your monthly bandwidth is 10 MB, if a visitor views your page, they will download 1MB of data. If there are n-number of visitors in a month who are, assumingly, viewing your entire site, you will run out of data.
After that, either your web host will not allow you any more visitors or charge you extra MB.
Your bandwidth is something you need to always be aware of, especially when you run a site that is media intensive. Just like storage, some hosts offer “unlimited” bandwidth, but if you think you’re in the safe space, be sure to check out the limits or choose the host that says the bar where all can see it.
Unlike storage space, which can easily be cleared or controlled by deleting or unloading content as needed, bandwidth requires a more flexible and subtle calculation. You don’t want to pay for more than you need but you also don’t want to turn customers away or deal with the sometimes significant penalties for going over your allotted amount.
Affordable Price
This is something that is usually considered first. You need something that is affordable but you also need the best and reliability from the source.
As an extremely important factor that most of us look at while choosing a hosting provider, this shouldn’t be the defining or deciding factor for it.
Jumping on the cheapest are the most affordable, according to your need, an offer will not necessarily be the best idea, especially when you are relying on a site to make money.
Things like non-outsourced support and good quality hardware will cost money and a reliable hosting company that is willing to charge $1.99/month will most likely look after these features. Consider this as a very important aspect and look into all the features each host is providing and accordingly, compare the prices and choose the one that’s best for your company, in monetary and growth ways.
Payment/ Refund Policy
Almost every web hosting company provides a trial period and you need to understand when the trial period ends. Check out the money-back guarantee of the hosting company and what happens if you cancel within the trial period. Will you receive a full refund or is there any cancellation fee?
Find out all the possibilities of what could happen after the trial period ends. Does the host offer a prorated refund or do they charge a cancellation fee?
With the free trial, you can safely test out all the hosting plans and opt out if it doesn’t fit your website needs or if it does. If things don’t go as planned, choosing a company that comes with good refund policies will be the right choice so that you don’t lose much money while purchasing a providing service.
Look for a company that guarantees a full 100% money-back refund during your trial period without a cancellation fee so that you don’t lose your money.
Control Panel / User Interface
One of the most crucial features to consider, especially when starting online, is the control panel.
You will control your website from here.
You need to do certain things by yourself like setting up an email account, installing WordPress, backing up your sides, and more essential settings. To do that with ease, even if you don’t have tech support in your website or system, you need to configure an easy way to use the control panel.
Even if you are not tech-savvy, there are some things that you will be able to do via a stable control panel for your website without calling support from your company at times. It is easy to understand that you won’t need any support while managing minor changes on your platform.
Some of the best support in the market are cPanel or Plesk, they make the hefty work of your website like updates and modifications a lot easier and maintain your website, and allow it to grow.
Make sure that your web hosting companies provide you with an easy to understand user-friendly interface control panel that makes your work a lot easier.
Data Backup Options
Backups are essential for websites. Even with all the amazing security and antivirus software in the world, your website is bound to crash or fail at some point, it could be because of many factors. The worst thing that can happen is that it’ll go down for a few hours, if not completely vanish from the face of the earth and the internet.
So you can tell how important it is to backup your website’s data. It’s not an optional thing, it’s a necessity and most web hosting companies offer some form of backup.
A reliable web hosting company should be organized enough to restore your website within a few hours. If they’re unable to restore the entirety of it, they should at least be able to get back a large chunk of data stored in your website with a minimal amount of downtime so that your brand doesn’t lose too much money or face any kind of big losses.
Some of the important questions that you need to consider asking your web host about backups are :
- Do they conduct regular full backups?
- Can you manually backup your site via the control panel?
- Can you use programs to create auto backups of your site?
- Can you restore the backup files yourself or do you need the support staff to do it?
Before purchasing, be sure to look for a hosting company that runs a full backup of your site regularly. That will help you restore your site if anything goes south.
- Features
While most hosting companies do offer all necessities for a website, you should always check if they offer other essential features such as one-click installer, file manager, and DNS management.
- One-Click installer
A One-click installer is a great tool to help you easily install applications such as WordPress. This is especially needed if you’re not the best when it comes to the technical aspects of web creation.
- FTP/SFTP Access
Most hosting providers offer some form of file manager which tends to be quite limited. With FTP/SFTP, you will be able to handle and move large amounts of files on the server safely.
Whether it’s multiple data centres or additional features such as regular data backups or free domain privacy, posting companies offer more than just servers. If you see one that offers something you need or finds important, that can be a good indicator that you should look into using that company.
Most shared hosting plans offer server resources that are more than enough for small websites but when it comes to storage and bandwidth, you can easily use third-party platforms such as Google docs to handle your images and documents.
Ability To Add Multiple Domains
While you may be having a small website, with a single domain name, with the increasing popularity of your website you will be needing multiple domains and subdomains to popularize your site even more.
As the potential of a company increases, you would want it to reflect on your website as well. You will be needing a website that will grow bigger and attract large traffic.
So, before purchasing a web hosting plan, be sure to ask your provider if they allow you to run multiple websites on a single web hosting account and if you can add new domains to scale your website, over time.
Space to Grow
For any growing company or startup, this is the most essential feature that you will be looking for as a site and a web page that has the potential to grow.
Having a large number of options that will help you broaden the horizon of your website’s capability and reach out to customers at a bigger and faster pace, will not only benefit your company in the current times but also help you to popularise your market brand and make it stand out and larger than you can comprehend.
Make sure that your web hosting provider is giving you additional features like multiple data centres, regular data backups, and free domain privacy, etc. These little add ons will make your website more attractive and generate a higher ROI.
Conclusion
To conclude it all, when choosing a hosting company, take your time and all the options so you can save a lot of time in trouble if you just be more mindful of how and what you are looking for.
To sum it up, here is a list of few things that you need to be mindful of before purchasing or looking for a web host :
- What does your website need?
- Their uptime scores and server reliability
- Plans and pricing
- Payment and Renewal policies
- Add-ons / Extra Features
- Regular Backup feature
- Data space + Bandwidth
- Technical and Customer Support Quality
- Server speed and response rate
- Trial and Refund Policy
While there are several factors that one should consider before investing in web hosting, the questions listed above are the ones you should keep in mind before purchasing a service and see if all the features and the benefits that you are looking for before starting a website. Looking deeply into all the aspects of the companies of your choice, in order to headstart your website in the most beneficial and profitable way, go forward with the one you think you will enjoy the most.
