Practical Tips On How To Choose a Web-Hosting Service

When setting up a website, one of the important details you have to consider is web hosting. There are a number of web hosts out there and choosing the wrong one may greatly affect the performance of the site and the whole experience may become so frustrating you may consider shutting down the website. But do not give up just yet, it is possible to find the best hosting provider. There are certain points to help you identify the right hosting company to go with and here are a few tips.

The Speed of Servers

Your website is going to be hosted on servers and the speed of these servers will impact your user experience, slow servers will mean that pages on your website will take longer to load and this, in turn, affects ranking as well as the user experience. Most visitors to a site will leave if it does not load quickly. Server speed may be affected by a number of factors. First of all, you need to choose between dedicated and shared servers. Shared servers are likely to be slower than dedicated ones although the latter will be more expensive. The middle ground would be the virtual servers even though for some types of websites the performance may not be as good.

Price

When you see adverts for web hosting, you may be attracted to the ones that seem unbelievably low. There usually is more to it that they present. In the long run, there are hidden costs for extra services like security and SSL certificate, some of them will advertise a monthly rate but they expect you to pay a compounded rate for a whole year, and you will only get to know this later.

It is better however to go with a monthly payment plan and then you can choose to upgrade according to the demands of your website. You do not want to have paid for a year only to realise you need to change the tier in order to meet the demands of your website.

Technical Support

There is no way you can get by without support from the hosting company. It is bound to happen that the servers may be down or your website may be under attack and you will need someone to attend to that problem from their end. Get assurance of the availability of tech support whenever you need it.

Downtime can cost your business a lot. Just imagine what would happen if emails are not getting to you yet that is the main way your customers reach you to make orders. Or if your website is off for just an hour, how much business will you lose?

On top of the tech support is the community support. Sometimes it helps to be able to ask your peers for help with a particular problem. Check if the hosting service has chat rooms, videos and other communities that can provide support.

Security

Websites are constantly under threat of attack from hackers and the hosting sites need to be able to fight off these attacks and provide sufficient security to ensure your website is safe. Find out about the company’s firewall protection along with information about how often they carry out updates on their malware protection.

Sometimes even with the best protection, a threat may turn into reality, in such a case you need a plan B. Backup systems are the next best thing, if the servers are attacked, your website could be transferred to a backup and that saves you from downtime. You may have to pay more for that.

Added Services

It should not just be hosting service that they provide, your website needs other services and it is more convenient if you could get some of those from the hosting company. Find out if they also offer email. Most hosting companies will give you either limited or unlimited email accounts as part of their package. You may also want a domain, security, and other features that may depend on the nature of the business you are into. Look for the added features that will help your business.

When all is said, it comes down to you and what you really need. If possible, write down a list of the things you need from the best hosting provider and compare with the services being offered. You, however, should not get caught in the price trap – Do not go for the cheap one, because quite often they are not as good as they should be.