Great, you’ve finally decided to take your business online with your own website! You’ve probably also read that you need to find a reliable web hosting company. There are plenty of web hosting providers out there. To help you choose the right hosting company for you, we’ve put together the most important factors that you need to consider when choosing one.
1. Reliability
Reliability is the most important thing to consider when choosing a web hosting provider. Unreliable or dated hardware can push your website offline. This can, for example, cause a decline in search engine ratings and loss of sales/readership. To make sure you’re choosing a reliable hosting provider, it’s best to check their historical uptime scores. Providers with an uptime score 99.5% or more are worth considering. Any hosting company with an uptime score below 99% should be avoided.
2. Security
It’s important to choose a web hosting provider that protects your website from cybercriminals. Make sure your hosting provider implements firewall rules, that they update their machines, and that they monitor the network to prevent harmful traffic.
3. Backups
Cyber attacks happen more and more often and can happen to any website. These attacks can leave major damage to your website and sometimes make it impossible to restore it. Therefore, it’s important you choose a web hosting provider that regularly creates backups of your website’s files.
4. Customer Service
When your site goes offline for some reason, it’s important that the hosting provider can help you out. So, especially as a new business owner, it’s important to choose a hosting company that provides 24/7 high-quality customer service. A good way to check this is to read customer reviews and looking them up on Twitter.
5. Control Panel
When you have a website it’s important to know how to perform tasks, such as creating a new email account, installing WordPress, and installing plugins, yourself. Control Panels like Plesk make managing your website a lot easier. Therefore, it’s important to check if your hosting provider offers a user-friendly control panel.
6. Scalability
There is a chance that your online business grows so well that your chosen hosting plan is no longer sufficient. It’s important to know if your hosting provider can upgrade your subscriptions and if they allow you to upgrade from shared hosting to VPS hosting or dedicated hosting.
7. Price
Price shouldn’t be a deciding factor but is of course something we all look at. However, choosing the cheapest offer you see usually isn’t the best idea. It’s important to look at what you get for what you pay for. To avoid surprise bills, also check the renewal chargers for your hosting package.
8. Area of focus
It’s important to remember that different hosting providers are differently suited to host different kind of websites. Some hosting providers have amazing enterprise solutions but aren’t good for someone with a small fashion blog. It’s important to look into the area of focus of the hosting provider you’re considering. Always choose the one that suits your business best.
9. Hardware
Hardware can influence the performance of the servers of your hosting provider and with that the performance of your site. Therefore, it’s important to check what kind of machines your hosting provider uses.
10. Competitive advantages
Hosting companies often offer more than just servers. For example, some hosting providers have energy-saving practices or offer advantages such as free domain privacy. If you see that one hosting provider offers something that you need, that can be a good sign that this is the right company for you.
