5 Primary Factors to Consider When Choosing a Web Host for Your Site + 4 Additional Ones
The competition among hosting providers is very intense. For website owners, it might be tricky to understand which of the competitive advantages of a certain provider are truly meaningful — and which ones serve as pleasant add-ons. From this article, you’ll get to know about five crucial factors that you need to pay attention to when choosing a hosting for your site. Plus, you’ll find a list of parameters that might also be important for your business, depending on its needs.
Table of Contents
5 Crucial Parameters of Website Hosting
Uptime
This term denotes the time when users can visit your site, and it will be operating as intended. No web resource can be available 24/7/365 — but the closer the uptime indicator to 100%, the better. Ideally, it should be 99.5% or more. Plans with 99.99% uptime are usually the most expensive ones.
You should opt for a fully managed cloud hosting service if you lack an in-house IT team. The term “fully managed” means that the provider will take care of all the technical aspects themselves.
The higher the uptime, the easier it will be for you to attract and retain customers. If users can effortlessly open all the pages of your site and they load quickly, it should enable you to boost your sales and maximize revenue. Plus, uptime impacts Google ranking: it improves the site’s position in organic search results.
Storage
The more files you’re planning to upload to your site, the more storage space they will require. Some providers might offer unlimited storage space for all their plans. Others would charge you for using it — in this case, you might want to start with a cheaper plan and upgrade to a pricier one as your site grows.
Before signing a contract with the provider, please make sure that you’ll be able to upgrade to more advanced plans quickly, smoothly, and without large fees.
Traffic
Some website hosting services have a monthly traffic limit. You’ll reach this limit when a certain number of users visit your web resource per month. Then, you’ll need to pay a fee for extra visitors — or the provider will stop displaying your site on the Internet. The wisest approach would be to select a provider that offers unlimited data traffic to all its clients.
Loading Speed
The quicker your site loads, the happier its visitors and the more likely they will be to order your goods or services. Plus, Google prioritizes the pages that load faster, so the overall ranking of your website should improve.
Data Security
The provider should feature an information redundancy system and constant backups. This serves as a guarantee that your website is always online and fully operational, regardless of any natural or unforeseen problems (such as hacking attacks, viruses or failures). Some providers might conduct regular full backups and at the same time allow you to manually backup your site via the control panel. You might be able to use programs to create auto backups of your site. You might either need to ask the support staff to restore your backup files or do it yourself.
The backup service will enable you to restore your full site or at least a huge chunk of it with minimal downtime.
Additional Factors That You Might Want to Pay Attention to
Apart from the five vital parameters that were listed above, you might want to focus on a few additional ones. For some site owners, these parameters might not be too important — while for others, they become a substantial prerequisite of their businesses’ success.
Customer Support
If you have an in-house team that can take care of the technical aspects related to hosting, you should be less dependent on the provider’s support. Yet even in this case, you might need to ask questions or report failures from time to time. An ideal support team should be available 24/7 through different communication channels: live chat, phone, email and messengers. They should always strive to fix your problem immediately after you contact them.
Payment Methods
You should get to know which payment options your hosting provider supports. Plus, you should ask them whether they could offer you a discount for paying through a specific payment system or for a certain period of time. Some providers have discounts for clients who pay ahead for long periods of usage.
Content Management System
This element is essential for websites whose content updates frequently. Your provider can either offer you its own intuitive content management system or allow you to install WordPress or another open-source solution.
Free Trial
This useful option enables you to try the provider’s services for free for a limited period of time. You’ll be able to check whether the provider indeed delivers everything that they have promised. During the free trial, you can assess the professionalism of the provider’s support team and the functionality of all their helpful add-ons. If you realize that you like this provider, you’ll stay with them and you’ll pay money to them. If you prefer to look for another one, you leave this provider after the end of the trial and you won’t need to pay a single cent to them.
Some providers might offer you a refund instead of a free trial. This means, you’ll need to pay them to be allowed to test their services — and if you don’t like them, you’ll get some part of your money back.
Conclusion
Hopefully, you found this article informative and now you better understand how to select a top-notch web hosting provider. You should pay primary attention to such factors as uptime, the amount of storage space, the site’s loading speed, monthly traffic limits and data security. Plus, you might want to assess the provider’s customer support, the selection of payment methods, the discount system, the lack or presence of a content management system and the opportunity of a free trial. The competition among hosting providers is fierce, so you should be able to find the one that perfectly suits your needs.