If you are considering which website hosting service you should use, you may be trying to do some research to figure out what the best web hosting service is. Before you look into hosting companies, you need to understand what kind of hosting you need. If you get a hosting package that is too low, you might experience some serious problems.
Shared / VPS / Dedicated Hosting
If you are looking for the cheapest web hosting, this will often mean that your website is hosted on a shared server. Whether you are researching cloud hosting, managed WordPress, etc., most of these are going to be on a shared server.
What does this mean for your website? This means that you could be sharing the same server with hundreds of people. This may not be a problem when your site is just getting started, but it will be a problem if your site needs to pull a lot of resources.
If you can afford to go with a VPS or dedicated server this means you are going to have resources that are all your own and you don’t have to worry about anyone else infringing upon what is yours. VPS is virtual but the dedicated server is an actual disk. Obviously the dedicated server is going to give you the best results since you have the whole server to yourself without it being split up like a VPS, but it comes with a price. You also need to make sure that you have enough storage.
Let’s go on to look at the 5 qualities your website hosting services should have.
1. Reliability
If your website goes down, this causes major problems for you. It means that your website visitors will get an error message, won’t be able to visit your site and that means they can’t do business with you. In addition to preventing visitors from accessing your site, you will also find that if it is down for a long time, it can hurt your search engine rankings.
While uptime guarantees aren’t always reliable, you should look for a host that guarantees at least 99% uptime. You should also look on the web to see what other people have to say about the service. If most people say that the hosting is reliable then you may have a good bet.
2. Speed
Your server needs to be quick. If your server is slow, it doesn’t matter how well optimized your website may be for search engine ranking, you are still going to have a server that inhibits your abilities to provide a great user experience for the visitors on your site.
People are getting continually more impatient and that is especially true when they are holding a mobile device. Nowadays, your website speed is a ranking factor for mobile search in Google. You need to ensure that you web server is not overburdened. Visit the hosting company’s website as well as other websites that are hosted on the server that you are considering to see if it loads fast enough.
According to Neil Patel, 47% of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less. Any longer, and it could impact your conversion rates, as well as your rank in SERPs.
3. Space
You don’t want to have to move your website so make sure that you have enough space to grow. If you don’t have enough space to grow your website, you are going to have to undergo the website migration process. This process can cause you to lose files and have other complications if it isn’t done correctly.
If you aren’t sure how much space you are going to need, you can speak to someone that is working with you on hosting and ask them for their recommendations after you tell them your goals for your website. Make sure to get a couple of opinions to make sure the advice is solid.
4. Bandwidth
When you think about bandwidth, that means how many visitors are allowed to come to your site per day. If you use too much bandwidth, you site can be shut off or you will get charged more money for the additional bandwidth that you used. This is to protect the web hosting companies from people that uses all of the server resources. Ensure that there is an option to buy more bandwidth when you need it in the future.
5. Support
Having high quality customer support is key. If you don’t have prompt customer support through the sales process, it is highly unlikely that you are going to get it in the case that you need technical help. Make sure that you test their customer support and also look for reviews from current customers. If you have a site issue, you want to make sure that you can get it fixed right away. The less downtime and less site glitches that you have the better so make sure that someone is on hand to help you.
Conclusion
As you are choosing your hosting, make sure that you find a company that has all of the above qualities so that you an get the best results. You don’t want to have to move your website from one hosting company to another since that is just asking for trouble so doing your due diligence is important. Now is the time to go through any indecision that you might have and then ensure that you are sticking with your decision and getting your website out there to the world.
Was this article helpful and informative? Leave us a comment with your thoughts in the section below.
