The Importance of Choosing the Right Hosting Service for Your Website

You have to make a number of important decisions when you are going about the task of creating a website for your personal or business use. Considerable thought and effort may have gone into coming up with the perfect domain name that captures the essence of the product or service that you hope to bring to the Internet.

Then there is the question as to what kind of website you want to make and what type of content you plan on making available to your visitors. Perhaps you're making a personal website that you will use to display your portfolio and attract new customers. You might be opening a full-scale e-commerce site and need to be able to provide payment and shipping options for your clients. Maybe you are just putting up informational pages about your company as a digital marketing tool.

No matter what your intention was, perhaps you started this endeavor with some past experience or you may have had no idea about making a website when you began. One factor that you may not have considered is the hosting service that you will use for your website.

Every website needs a hosting service. It is the way your site is presented to the public. All of the work that you perform in an effort to create the best site you can will be wasted if you are using the wrong hosting service. In fact, the hosting service that you choose can have a significant impact on the success or failure of your website.

There are a number of pretty severe ramifications that can result from choosing the wrong hosting provider. They are:

• Downtime and associated revenue loss - If your website is not up and accessible you won’t be be attracting customers or conducting business.
• Lower search engine rankings - Websites with quicker load times are boosted in the Google search rankings.
• Security problems - Cyber attacks can ruin your business and your online reputation so good security is mandatory.

Let’s look at some of the factors that differentiate web hosting services. Based on the purpose you envision for your website, some these factors may be more important than others, but they all can impact the viability of your website to flourish and achieve the goals that you intended it to accomplish.

We will not be suggesting particular hosting services, and you should expect to do some research to find which provider will work best in your particular situation. Here’s what you need to keep in mind when choosing your web hosting provider.

Understand Your Hosting Needs

Understanding the basic features that you will need from a hosting service is key to finding the right one for your site. The speed and storage capacity that you will require can vary widely depending on your planned usage. You obviously will need more capacity if you are streaming video 24 hours-a-day than if you are making a static portfolio site to use as an online resume.

Try to codify the direction your website will be taking and the growth you expect in the next 12 months when selecting a hosting provider. It is ok to start small with the potential to add features later, but you need a provider that offers that route to you. A hosting service that provides the ability to expand may be vital when your site starts to take off.

Website Speed

The speed at which your website performs is one of the most critical factors in its success or failure. Users just don’t want to wait around, and sluggish response time will lead to lost opportunities as visitors get impatient and click away.

A good hosting service will have a fast network with enough server capacity to handle traffic spikes and variable volume. They will also take advantage of strategies such as caching and employing a Content Delivery Network to increase the load times of the site they support.

Server Reliability

Closely associated with the speed of your website is its availability. If it’s not up, your business is suffering. A good web hosting provider will have an uptime of 99.95% or better. If your provider cannot guarantee at least a 99% uptime, you should move on to the next provider in your list. Don’t settle for anything less for your website.

Website Security

Security is important for any website, but even more so if you are collecting personal information on your visitors or conducting e-commerce where financial information is required to be exchanged. A secure website is essential to your success and even an inadvertent disclosure of personal information or spreading of malware can wreck your online business. According to webarxsecurity.com, over 18,000 hacks against U.S. websites occurred in February of 2018.

Security comes in a number of guises. You want your hosting service to be responsible for keeping all of its server software properly patched and up-to-date. They also need to provide Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) security when your visitors are transferring any type of sensitive information such as credit card numbers.

Backup Strategy

To many computer users, backups are boring and in many cases are seriously neglected. This is not an attitude to have if you are running a website. Backups should be a crucial component of your web hosting package.

Emergency situations such as inadvertently deleting a webpage or making a change that breaks your site can be handled with a robust backup strategy. Your provider should be retaining multiple iterations of backups so you can go back in time and restore whatever it is that you need. Be sure to query your hosting service on the type of backups they provide. If the answer does not satisfy you, it’s time to take your search elsewhere.

Conclusion

These are some of the factors to consider when choosing your web hosting provider. While cost may be important to you, saving a few dollars at the expense of any of the elements discussed above can lead to an underperforming website and the failure of your enterprise.

Was this article helpful and informative? Leave us a comment with your thoughts in the section below.