If you’re running an online business or marketing your website or brand, you need to choose the best web hosting services for your business. The service is as important as your domain or brand name.Those who are launching new sites should overlook essential questions when they’re choosing a web hosting for their business. Convenience, cost, are some of the factors to consider.
When you’re choosing a web hosting service, you need to make the right decision. Avoid making mistakes whenever you’re choosing a hosting. You may realize that the services are poor or you were highly charged. Web hosting service is a long contract that requires you to think, and make the right decision before swinging into action. You should also look at the package and find it its usefulness and suitability.
Before you choose web hosting packages, you need to consider few essential and important factors. It is always good to take your time and look at the important aspects of the hosting plan you’re about to purchase. Of course you need to do some research and you might even incur additional costs but it is the right decision you can ever make. You don’t need to be a web expert to know the right web hosting. You just need to do some research.
Choosing the Best Web Hosting for Your Business in 2017
What is the best web hosting company for your business?
In this digital world, we all think of creating a website so as to market our business or promote an already existing business. When you’re creating a website, of course you need to be realistic. You need to understand exactly what you need and how you’re going to achieve it in the first 12 months of hosting and the next couple of years.
Of course you need a hosting company that can handle the traffic in your site without necessarily paying over the odds for hosting packages. For most blogs and websites, shared hosting is the best option. This is where most sites share one major serve aiming at lowering the coat for everyone.
Space and the amount of traffic your site can handle is limited but a blog site drawing up to 50.000 visitors monthly would be just fine on a shared server.
If you’re targeting a lot of visitors or more than what a shared server can handle, you need to consider using a virtual private server or a dedicated web server. These serves will offer a designated amount of space that is great for your site. These serves are secure, faster and highly convenient than shared hosting. Below are some factors you need to consider when choosing web hosting services for your business.
*** You may want to know: Web Hosting Types – Some Pros and Cons!
1. What is the cost of renewing your web hosting?
After the initial sign up, you need to understand that your web hosting should be renewed. Of course there is a cost to renew your hosting plan/package. The cost of renewing may vary from package to package depending on the terms.
It is crucial to know that signing a package is cheaper than renewing the same package at the end of year or validity period. Most people end up paying higher for renewal because they did not understand all the terms of the package. It is always good to do the research first. If you’d like to know how much you’d be required to pay for renewal, you can check from web hosting terms of service.
Rarely will you find a web hosting company that charges the same prices for signing up and renewal. Many customers will charge lower cost in signing so as to attract you. You will be required to pay higher charges at the time of renewal.
If you sign up for auto-renewal, you may realize that you paid higher when the money have just left the account. It is crucial to understand the terms of service for web hosting renewal. It is advisable to avoid auto-renewals unless you have read and understood the terms and agreed to sign the contract.
2. Unlimited web hosting
As I said on the article Unlimited Shared Web Hosting Service: The Untold Secrets, If your web hosting service is giving unlimited data or storage, you need to check the usage policy and confirm. It is not wise to assume that it is unlimited.
3. Can you handle downtime?
The drawback of a shared hosting is that you’re sharing resources to avoid high cost of private servers or hosting. You may realize that you’re experiencing crashing or slow responsiveness because of something out of your control. This may affect your site in a great deal. Your site may also go down several times a month for few minutes. This is not good for the clients and of course for the future of your business. In such a case you can consider a private hosting.
Before signing up for public or shared hosting, you need to take time and look into reported reliability, effectiveness and convenience of shared hosting. If there are a lot of complaints from clients, it is important to avoid a shared hosting.
*** Helpful Post: Tracking Your Website’s Uptime – The Ultimate Guide
4. Do you need flexibility?
You may plan to spend a year or so in developing your website and then expand or launch a major campaign. This means that your hosting requirements may change significantly. This means you need to consider the kind of flexibility your hosting company is offering in terms of ease of upgrading and long you’re fixed into the initial plan or package.
The worst situation is signing up a hosting package with a company that is not flexible. It is bad and disappointing to realize that the company to whom you signed a hosting package only offers a shared hosting and cant upgrade to a different web hosting package.
5. What type of support do they offer?
If you’re new in web hosting or you have some questions that you want answered, it is important to sign up a contract with a company that has support team. The team will ensure all your questions on hosting and upgrading are perfectly answered.
There are different web hosting companies, and it is always good to choose the best. You can choose the one that offers live support. This is clear and a perfect choice for most website owners as it is the convenient and all questions are answered on a live chat.
6. Do you need eCommerce features?
If you are planning to be getting payment for goods or services through your website, you should consider a hosting that supports eCommerce sites and eCommerce features.
Some Good eCommerce Features:
- Create your own professional online store
in just a few clicks - Includes a domain and an e-mail address
- Attract customers through newsletter distribution
and easy Facebook integration
- Make your products visible on price comparison
sites and online marketplaces. - Security with SSL Certificate
- Optimized for mobile devices
- Powerful online marketing tools
sites and online marketplaces. - Support all payment methods
- Presence on all online marketplaces (eBay, Amazon…)
7. Do you need an email address?
If you think you need an email address, you must ensure the hosting package has that option. Always read up the email package, the cost, and ease of use. This is an important factor if you want a professional website.
8. Check the control panel
It is very important to check on the control panel. Even if you’ve found the best web hosting deal but can’t fully utilize the control panel, you can’t take full advantage of the package you’ve paid for. You can go through FAQs or user guides to try understand about the control panel before singing or buying a package.
9. Do you have special needs?
If you have special needs, you should choose a hosting company that that has what it takes. For instance, the developing tools must always be compatible with all hosting. It is good to check what your package does and what it doesn’t support. This will help you understand if your needs will be met.
10. Are you backed up?
It is important to always have a backup due to security purposes. Anything can happen, the server can go down, your site can get hacked and much more and thus the need for back up. You should consider hiring a web hosting company that offers backup. Even if you’re be required to pay backup cost, it is worth it. Before selecting a good web hosting service, you need to be careful regarding the above factors.
Conclusion
A good web hosting company will announce their uptime. By this, it means that they will inform their clients about the time when the hosting service will be up. Usually, a good company will announce a 99.9% uptime. Also, normally, a company with a good uptime might charge more for the services but then again, the better the uptime, the better the quality of the service. Many of the companies that provide these services might look attractive because of the extras they provide. However, you need to consider the most important services that can be determined after carefully analyzing the goals of your business/company. These extras should not be made a priority when choosing one of the companies.
Many people possess the skills as well as the equipment that is required for web hosting. However, carrying out this task on your own might not be a good idea. Therefore, people tend to select a good service rather than use their own skills. This is because the task is better left alone with more skilled people who are good at carrying out these services and meeting your requirements. Also, they can easily carry out the monitoring of the server and ensure that your website is also monitored at all times.
Thank you for reading the article, wish you clever when choosing your hosting provider. Nice a day!
