When it comes to kick-starting an online business or building an online presence for your small business, choosing the right webhosting provider can be one of the major concerns to get everything on the right track. As your business website or online store will be self-reliant on their assigned web host company, it’s important to make sure you choose a solution that is not only reputable but also customizable to your growth needs and also provides superior customer support in the process.
Small business owners and companies who take enough time to find out a best and well reputed hosting company, they make sure that their business website, online store or blog remains accessible 24/7 on the web and safe for the users as well.
Understand your Hosting Needs First
Before contacting with a hosting company, you should be clear about what you exactly want from a hosting provider. Consider basic things like what you are about to build (like a blog, online store or online portfolio), which programing language you will use, what amount of traffic you want the hosting company to handle and (most importantly) which market you will target (local or international) etc. These are the things that can aid you to choose an apt hosting provider to get a required website or blog developed conveniently.
Tech Specs
Take a close look at your website and determine what you want a hosting provider to do for you. For instance, if it is an online store or you want to host videos and other content on the site, then you shouldn’t choose a cheap and basic package offered by them. Â Instead, you should move with a webhost that offers RAM, bandwidth, high speed processing power, and enough disk space to meet all the needs of your website. You can also call your favorite webhosting provider to ask about their packages and what tech specs they offer. Tell them clearly what you need and what they can offer to serve all your needs.
Server Uptime and Performance
Website downtime not only make the user experience worse but can also lower your ranking in search engines. Time is money not for business owners but for customers as well and if a website is inaccessible for periods of time, it can lose out on hundreds of sales opportunities and valuable visitors as well. That’s why, you should have a hosting company that can keep your online store or site up-and-running 24/7.
Technical Support
Quick and 24/7 technical and customer support is something most vital that beginners should consider when choosing a best web host. You will also find that like in price and technical specifics, all web hosts are not equivalent. Since tech support is something that will help users to find out the issues with their websites and fix them as soon as possible to get a website or blog back online. So, always go with a hosting provider who take customer support as one of their priorities.
Price
Finding out a web host can be a tough job which is affordable and reliable at the same time. However, you can find the best price and reliability by comparing different hosting providers in the market. You can also find a list of hosting providers recommended by professionals via Google search to make the process of finding best web host easier than ever. However, you need to ensure that you are getting the best in exchange of the money you will be paying.
Add-Ons
You may need something more than just web hosting from your hosting provider such as SSL certificate, multiple data centers, regular data backups or free domain privacy and other security related add-ons to make your website or blog stand out from the crowd. So always check for add-ons and other features offered by the company that might be useful for you. You can also contact with the customer services department to ask for add-ons you want from them.
Customer Reviews
Before signing up for an affordable and reliable package from your favorite hosting company, remember to check for customer reviews and feedback. For this purpose, you can do a Google search for hosting company, or can search for their social media profiles like Twitter and Facebook etc to check what their customers are saying about their services. moreover, you can also ask questions about a specific hosting provider on social media to know the compliments of their real users.
Control Panel
Whether you are an expert or about to enter into the world of internet, you should be able to manage tiny things like installing CMS on your domain, setting up business email on the website and managing FTP accounts Etc. without contacting the customer services department of web hosting provider. For this purpose, you will need to access control panel of your hosting account. A web hosting provider that allows you to use the cPanel to make changes or updates to your hosting account, can help you get things fixed in real time without the assistance of any other person.
Regular Website Backup
There can be a lot of unforeseen events and incidents such as sudden website crash, hacking attacks and malware etc when you may need to recover website data from the back up account. And a hosting provider offering regular website backup can help you get rid of such situations and to get all the necessary website data back within moments to get your website/blog back online easily. It makes restoration of the website quick and convenient as well, so always check for the website back up feature when you are searching for the best and reliable web host.
Scalability
You will definitely want your business to grow and develop as per the latest market trends and selection of the right web host can play a vital role in the whole process. That’s why, you should check whether or not they fit into your future development plan. If someone else is providing you the best offers and features that also suit for your future development plans, you should sign up with them to ensure scalability for future plans.
Pick Your Host. Then Create Something Awesome!
For many first-time site owners and bloggers, the process of picking a web host can be quite confusing and time-consuming. The important thing to remember is that ‘most’ web hosting solutions are the same in the services and hosting they offer. Many of them will also fall into the same price range when it comes to web hosting on shared services.
With all of this in mind, pick a handful of potential web hosts, then choose which one you like. At the end of the day, your web host is something that you will likely have for many years to come, so make sure you end up going with a good one, and not simply the cheapest one.