One of your first steps as a business owner should be to digitalize your company. Since we live in a techy world, it is hard to imagine a successful company without a website or custom email address.
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The only way you can do that is by purchasing a hosting plan.
Now, this is the section where it gets a bit complicated for beginners, but the truth is, the process for choosing the ideal hosting provider for your business is fairly simple.
How to Choose the Ideal Hosting Provider for Your Business
Since there are many hosting providers, choosing between them might be overwhelming just because they all have similar offers.
In today’s article, we will highlight some of the things you need to consider in order to make the process smoother.
Type of Hosting Plans
In order to find choose the right hosting provider, first, you need to understand the type of hosting plans and their advantages and disadvantages.
Shared Hosting
This is the basic, most commonly picked hosting plan for most small business owners. This hosting plan is cheap just because it runs from hundreds to thousands of domains on one single server.
This hosting plan has the lowest performance out of all others, so if you are looking for a fast and responsive website, you’ll be better off choosing more expensive hosting.
Dedicated Server
This is a more advanced hosting option that is usually designed for big websites with already a lot of traffic per month. Just as the name suggests, with this hosting plan, you’ll get a dedicated server just for your website. This means that you won’t share server space with other people that might worsen your performance.
Additionally, you have full control over the server and your website will be more secure.
Virtual Private Server
A virtual private server is for more advanced users that need to install specific software or packages that are not provided with shared hosting. Even though this type of hosting is similar to shared hosting just because your website will be placed with other websites on the server, there are fewer websites per server.
This allows you to have more room and better performance.
Things to Consider
Bandwidth
Bandwidth is a measure of the maximum data that can be transferred to your hosting account at any given moment. It is usually measured in seconds.
Even though bandwidth is a rate of data transfer, it is still a different term. Data transfer refers to the consumption of bandwidth.
In other words, your website will load faster the more bandwidth you have. Fortunately, thanks to all the technological advancements, the average cost of data transfer is now very low. This means that hosting providers are very generous in terms of the data transfer limit.
Uptime
If you want to build a professional business, you need to choose a hosting provider with minimal server fluctuation or in other words less downtime. In today’s standards, you should look for uptime of 99% or above. Most hosting providers offer an uptime of 99.9% which is great for your website.
Disk Space
Disk space is the amount of data that can be stored on your web server. This depends on many factors such as the size of your website, images, emails and etc. For most small businesses 5GB to 10GB disk space should be enough for normal functioning.
There is no need to invest in larger disk storage if you don’t use it, and also you can upgrade later when you need it.
Security
We live in a world where cyber-crime is everywhere around us. Even small websites can be a victim of cybercrime and possibly leak clients’ information or even something worse. That’s why it is important to choose a hosting provider that offers some kind of security.
Hosting providers have daily malware scans and suspicious activity blocking. Additionally, they provide an SSL certificate (which is necessary) that can secure your website by encrypting the connection between the browser and your website.
Control Panel
Depending on your experience, you should always go for a hosting provider that provides a user-friendly interface. Running a website is not a difficult process, but the complicated interface can throw you off balance.
Your control panel is where you’ll manage all website processes. It is also a place where you access features like sub-domains, website builder, or many others. The best way is to go with hosting providers that have cPanel just because the system is very simple and effective.
Even beginners can easily set their website or change their settings. Just like the top NBA coaches of all time, according to The TwinSpires Edge, need full control of their team, you also need full control of your website so you can succeed and improve your rankings.
Customer Support
Last but not least, you have to worry about the customer support provided by your hosting provider. If you are a beginner when it comes to building websites, you need good customer support to help you with all the issues you face.
It is best if you go for a hosting provider that offers 24/7 support.
Final Words
Choosing a good website provider is crucial whether you want to make a small business website or a high-end online casino. Try to choose an online provider that provides scalable options that you can migrate to as your business grows.
In order to get a better idea about the services that hosting providers offer, you should check out people’s reviews. That way you’ll get a clear image of what you should expect once you purchase their services.
