When you’re on a tight budget, it’s important to consider economics, but it isn’t the only factor to consider when choosing a web hosting package. Web hosting agencies offer a range of different hosting plans. If you’re a small business owner, your intuition can falsely lead you to the most affordable option rather than quality-driven service.
For instance, web owners should make sure their websites perform well, confidential information is secure, their server has an uptime of 99.9%, and the website page loading speed surpasses industry standards. Additionally, if you’re planning to launch a website, keep in mind the following essential considerations:
1. Understand Different Web Hosting Types
There are few different types of web hosting, each catering to a specific kind of need. Identifying the fundamental differences between hosting services is crucial if you want to figure out what’s best. Here are some of the hosting packages you are likely to come across:
- Shared – As the name implies, your website is hosted on a server shared with other websites. It is best for small businesses that don’t require much bandwidth. The downside is casual slowdowns if any other website has heavier traffic.
- Virtual private server (VPS) – It is more suitable for bigger businesses that expect denser traffic. Few websites share the resources, making all of the websites faster. However, with a VPS, you’ll be given a dedicated virtual compartment for a website. As a result, VPS is a safer option than shared hosting. But, if your VPS plan isn’t managed through the host, you’ll need sufficient technical skills to handle your Virtual Private Server.
- Dedicated – With dedicated servers, the server will be in your hand. You can have heavy traffic and bandwidth or have multiple websites and control the whole hosting environment. It is a bit expensive but faster. A dedicated server plan gives you access to the entire server’s resources with no constraints. If you aren’t getting a managed dedicated hosting package, you must have technical experience and skills.
- WordPress – WordPress is a website hosting plus building service that lets you build a website without any technical or programming skills. WordPress enables you to build a website with a distinguished content management system (CMS).
- Reseller – Reseller hosting service providers allow you to launch your branded website without worrying about building the website’s infrastructure from scratch. These agencies allow their customers to start their own hosting company and become resellers. Users can buy a reseller hosting package and give hosting solutions to their customers without worrying about server maintenance problems.
- Cloud – Cloud hosting balances the load and maximizes uptime by using several servers. Your website can connect to a “cluster” that uses resources from a centralized pool instead of a single server. This hosting service implies that if one server goes down, another takes over to keep everything operating. With it, you get the ability to scale your website across multiple servers. The prominent advantages of cloud hosting are easy scaling, isolate resources, dedicated IP addresses, and maximizing uptime.
2. Don’t Fall for “Unlimited Disk Space.”
Many web hosting services might lure you with unlimited storage or monthly data transfer limits, but it’s not accurate, or a new web owner ignores this issue. There are very high limits on features, and it works as long as you keep complying with the service provider’s terms & conditions.
To avoid that, make sure to talk to a representative and ask what offerings are on the unlimited packages. Because if your business starts growing and attracting tons of visitors, your website should remain stable and continue to work smoothly. That’s why you should know the alternative plans.
3. Data Transfer is not the same as Bandwidth and what You’re Getting
Data transfer refers to the total amount of data that can be used within a specified period, while bandwidth refers to the amount of data transfer at any given moment.
Make sure to know about the Bandwidth and data transfer limits before you sign up for a particular hosting package, as it could be a hassle if your bandwidth or data transfer limit is less than your requirements or as your business start to grow.
4. Backup has great Worth
Server problems tend to lead to accidental data loss, making it even more important to use a website hosting service that performs backup operations and helps restore your website if your website is down.
A website’s backups are critical. Even with the best security precautions in place, your website will have a crash, virus, hack, or failure attack that will take it down or destroy it.
A reputable website hosting company should be able to restore your entire site or at least a large portion of it with minimal downtime, which can help you minimize significant data loss.
The following are some of the essential questions you should ask your web host regarding backups:
- Do they make full backups regularly?
- Is it possible to manually backup your site through the management panel?
- Is it possible to implement software to create automatic backups of your website?
5. Ensure You Are Getting Proper Website Security
Website security is a big problem. If your website isn’t properly monitored and secure, hackers can get to your files, steal sensitive data, and misuse it. Moreover, there’s always the risk of malware, scams, and viruses.
While the notion of hosting is simple – a professional hosting firm gives you space to store files and data that is visible to the online community as a website – it may get a little more complicated when it comes to data protection.
Hosting firms go to extraordinary limits to protect the security of their servers and websites. There is, however, a narrow line between where your obligation for security ends and where the website hosting company’s role begins.
So when you bring your website in front of the hosting agency, it should inform you about the security circles that your website needs to implement to remain secure, such as using HTTPS, protection against XSS attacks, SQL injection, or the installments of security plugins.
So, make sure you have superior website security and proactive monitoring included in the hosting plan you purchase.
6. Make Sure They Guarantee a Maximum Uptime
If you have a business website, you lose money whenever it is unavailable. Even if you built a website for pleasure, you would suffer the consequences of giving visitors a bad experience and losing followers if they can’t access it every time they attempt.
The primary responsibility of a web hosting business is to keep your website accessible and functioning. While the hosting provider has to perform routine maintenance that will take your website offline for a short time, your web hosting provider should offer maximum uptime to ensure a consistent user experience.
There are numerous server monitoring tools available to follow a web host, but checking their uptime statistics is usually sufficient to determine whether or not a web host is reliable.
Today’s industry norm is 99.95% uptime, and you should try to avoid providers that offer anything less. Premium accounts, of course, will provide superior server stability, with some achieving uptimes of 99.99% or higher. With ProQuality Business Solutions, you can enjoy an average server uptime of 99.9%.
7. Is Your Web Host Agency Providing Essential Features
Although most hosting companies provide all critical functions, you should always double-check if they also offer other vital services like one-click installation, DNS administration, and file management.
One-click Installer- A one-click installer is a valuable tool for quickly installing WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, and others. This feature is beneficial if you don’t have much experience with the technical components of site design. All of our hosting plans include with it free 1-click WordPress installation.
.htaccess File Access- You’ll need access to the .htaccess file if you want to make site-wide administrative modifications. It allows you to alter and adjust a variety of features, such as password management and authentication.
Access to FTP/SFTP- Several hosting companies have a file manager, but it is usually rather basic. You’ll be able to easily manage and move massive volumes of files on the server if you have FTP/SFTP access.
8. Responsiveness and Speed of Hosting Server
To ensure that your website loads quickly and smoothly, work with a hosting provider that offers reliable and fast server speed. Not only will this significantly improve user experience, but it will also improve your SEO rankings.
You can check your website’s speed and responsiveness by using online services like WebpageTest and Bitcatcha. You may test a web host’s speed and server responsiveness by measuring its Time To First Byte (TTFB).
Conclusion
Spending some time selecting a hosting service and considering all of your alternatives resolve many future unclear problems. You can save a lot of time and aggravation if you choose your web hosting service more carefully.
When searching for a web host, keep the following aspects in mind:
- Understand Different Web Hosting Types
- Don’t Fall for “Unlimited Disk Space.”
- Data Transfer is not the same as Bandwidth and what You’re Getting
- Backup has great Worth
- Ensure You Are Getting Proper Website Security
- Make Sure They Guarantee a Maximum Uptime
- Is Your Web Host Agency Providing Essential Features
- Responsiveness and Speed of Hosting Server
If you want to conduct your business online and don’t have a website platform for that, our agency can provide you with a custom estimate for our web design and development service. We also offer web design and development, domain registration, and e-commerce solutions so that you can accomplish everything from a single authentic platform. Our reliable hosting agency can provide high-quality services that add value to your investment.