Web hosting is responsible for more than just storing and publishing content on your website. It is also important to maintain a good reputation by establishing an influential online presence.
If the website is the physical body of your business, web hosting is the nervous system. Due to the web hosting, you can offer your visitors a high-quality user experience, boost a positive brand image, and rank your website higher in the SERP (Search Engine Result Page).
However, if your website has a poor web hosting provider, it ruins the visitor’s experience, which directly affects your business in the long term. Today, the market is filled with several web hosting providers that offer a good price and high-quality ratio. But with so many options to choose from, it becomes hard to decide on a starting point.
This is why we are here. Today, we will let you go through the factors that you need to consider before selecting a web hosting provider for your website.
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Factors To Consider While Selecting A Web Hosting Solution
Selecting the best web hosting provider with all the options available out there can be a daunting task, especially when you are someone new to the industry. If you enter the industry without the right knowledge might result in several losses.
To truly weigh your options, here are a few factors that will help you out.
1. Reliability
Reliability is one of the factors that you would like to consider. Reliability holds at the top of our list because if you have an unreliable connection or weak hardware, it can cause your website to remain offline most of the time.
Being offline doesn’t only cause the loss of readership and leads to a decline in search engine rankings. A great way to ensure that your website is doing fine is to look at its historical uptime score.
Uptime is the rating given to the website out of 100%. The closer you are to 100%, the better your website. It has been seen that the website with <99% uptime has a bad reputation among the users.
2. Security
Security is sometimes overlooked while selecting the right web hosting services. According to a report, one out of every thirteen web requests is redirected to malware. Hence, you must-have solutions to protect your website from any cyber-attacks
Even though data security is added to website security, having security with the web hosting solution further revamp the overall security system. Today’s modern web hosting providers offer firewall features to keep any harmful attacks at bay.
Finally, user access control needs to be provided by the hosting provider. This helps you to limit the access of the websites to only administrative authorities.
3. Price
Even though the price is in the top three of our list, do not make this an influential fact. We understand that you have some budget, and hence, price does play an important role in selecting the right web hosting provider. We simply mean that you do not let a good deal go away because of the budget.
Going for the cheapest solution out there is one of the worst web hosting mistakes, especially when looking for a long-term solution. When reviewing the potential choices, evaluate the prices as the last deciding factor.
4. Competitive Features Offered
This part of this article covers the competitive feature that will keep your head from your competitors. A majority of the service providers come with a basic outline of services. So, no matter which one you choose, you get the same thing at the end of the day.
Look for the services that will come in handy in the long run. One such feature is Email services that allow the user to create an email using the domain name. Other features included provisioning access to the website tools, shopping cart, and WordPress.
5. Backups
With the rapid shift of businesses to digital platforms, cyber-attacks are no longer limited to financial websites. Instead, unprecedented websites are being targeted every day just because they are easy prey.
Cyber-attacks have become dangerous with the revolution of technology and can leave an irreversible scar for businesses. Hence, backups become the only option for the business to heal their wounds.
Considering these circumstances, you must select a web hosting platform that offers regular backups to your data.
6. Customer Services
Customer services are very important if you are new to this industry. However, if you have no prior experience managing a website, you are likely to hit a brick wall. So, you would be greatly benefited to have a highly trained customer services team in that case.
We would like you to recommend a web hosting solution 24/7 and that too of high-quality. That said, you will find almost all the companies promising you to give 24/7 customer service, but getting back to your queries takes several hours.
A good way to filter out these types of companies is by looking at their customer reviews. The customer testimonies that are available online shows the true extent of their customers’ services.
7. Scalability
Finally, the last on our list is scalability. Scalability is one of the important factors to consider when you know that your website traffic and the content will increase over time. As your traffic increases or your sales rise, you might find that your current web hosting package cannot sustain the boost. In that case, you need to shift to a bigger web hosting package.
Before selecting a web hosting provider, look for the following:
- Do they offer the flexibility of upgrading?
- Do they allow you to shift from VPS hosting to completely dedicated hosting?
It is necessary that you get these answers before selecting one. Remember, changing your web hosting provider is a complex procedure, so to avoid doing that in the future, select the right web hosting solution for your business today.
Verdict
A lot of groundwork and research work needs to be followed before selecting a web hosting solution for your website. There are many factors to consider while you are in the process.
Some of the factors we have already mentioned in this article are some basic requirements. You can complete the list by adding your website requirements, such as traffic, storage capacity, and customizations.