I know it’s hard to choose a web host for your business or personal website because there are hundreds of options available in the market. The right hosting has immense impact on your business and rankings. But if you know the right factors that should be considered before going with a web host, no one can stop you from growing your business.
Choosing a wrong web host will only increase your stress and headache because of unwanted expenses. Plus it highly impact on your rankings and business growth.
In this article, I will show you some key factors that I also consider before buying a web hosting for my website Posteons. Every website’s requirement is different so you must know what are your requirements and can match them with these key factors to make best possible decision.
1. Understand Your Website Needs
You can search for best web hosting on Google but you will only fall in spending extra bucks if you don’t know the needs of your website. So first step you must go with is to know needs of your site.
For this, ask yourself what you are about to build on your website OR in other words, what will you show to the visitors. Should I go with Custom website or easy to use WordPress CMS. How much traffic I will get after website got ranked.
These questions are simple ones but they are important to consider.
Reason?
The reason is Custom and WordPress websites both require different and additional resources. The traffic you will get also need to be consider why because if you have low bandwidth, physical memory and CPU power, then your website will go down during high traffic.
2. Type of Web Host
Second factor that plays vital role is what type of web hosting your website needs. There are different types of web hosting and different hosting plans. You can go with WordPress hosting, shared hosting, VPS hosting, dedicated hosting, cloud hosting or colocation hosting.
If you need normal resources like 1-2GB RAM, 10-20GB Storage, and normal CPU power then you can go with shared hosting as it is cheap and will not be heavy on your wallet. If you have high traffic that needs 4-10GB RAM, 100+GB of storage and high CPU power then you can go with VPS, dedicated or cloud hosting plans.
It all depends on what type of resources your site require and you can go with best type of web hosting.
3. Server Uptime and Reliability
Another key factor that I always look before choosing web host is server uptime. You might have heard that in 2013 when Amazon went down only for 30 minutes, it costs them around $66,240 per minute.
It’s enough to say by above live example that being live all the time is very important for businesses. For this, you need reliable and maximum server uptime that is 99.95% that is industry standard.
There are many hosting providers who are providing hosting that has 99.99% uptime and it is the best possible hosting in the market.
4. Quick Ability to Upgrade Server
In start of business, you can go with basic hosting that costs you light on your wallet. As your traffic grows so does the business, you will need high performance server.
No matter if you go with good shared hosting, it still have limited resources and you will require to upgrade server in the future. So choosing a web hosting that has the ability to quickly upgrade to higher server is the best hosting provider.
A hosting provider that let you upgrade the server easily within less time, it is the most helpful hosting provider in the market.
Useful Tip: Once your website reach 30,000 visitors per month, switch to VPS or Dedicated hosting. Go with web host that let you upgrade shared hosting to VPS or Dedicated within few minutes.
5. Customer Support
The most important factor is customer support because without it you can’t upgrade your hosting quickly and you can’t solve the issues that are out of your skills.
Having a 24/7 customer support is consider as the best web hosting provider. Moreover, it must also be checked that the technicians are cooperative, knowledgeable, and have good experience in managing the issues of web hosting.
Further, it is important to check that hosting providers’ support team is available on phone, email, and live chat support to ensure quick response in emergency. I also check if the hosting providers have published detailed tutorials both written and video that solve most of the hosting problems.
6. Security
Security is the main concern of small as well as big businesses. We all know hackers and scammers are continuously trying to hack different websites on daily basis. Bad news is that they succeed in hacking many website on daily basis.
The good news here I want to tell is there are hosting providers that take security measures very seriously. Many providers provide options that you can turn on like firewall and encryption technology but some activate it automatically without asking you to turn it on.
It is also important that your data is regularly backed up because we never know our website can be next victim of hackers. So it is important to have backup that we can restore after hacking.
Conclusion
It is important or I must say very important to consider the above key factors while choosing a web host. No matter you have small business or large business, your website must be on best hosting and it must be secure. You can save a lot of bucks if you keeps these factors in mind:
- Understand your website needs
- Types of web host
- Server uptime and reliability
- Quick ability to upgrade server
- Customer support
- Security
There are many other factors that must be considered but the ones I have put together above will help you make good decision in choosing hosting provider for your business website.