7 Factors To Know While Choosing A Web Hosting Services Provider

This article will discuss seven factors you should remember when looking for a web host. So whether you are looking for the best web hosting services in the UK or anywhere else in the world, reading this will help you make the best decision.

Why Is Selection of Reliable Web Host Important?

Without a profound online presence, businesses cannot survive in 2022. The performance of your web does not only depend on a good web development agency or freelancer. You have to be equally careful when picking the best web hosting services provider. 

If you pick a good web host, it results in a great user experience which helps develop a good brand reputation. Unfortunately, when you do not make good choices, the results are the opposite.

Picking a Good Web Hosting Services Provider: 7 Factors You Must Consider

Here are the following 7 key factors you must think about:

• UpTime

The first thing that matters is Uptime. Think of Uptime as the availability of your website for your audience. For how long it will be online and accessible to the audience, is called Uptime. Of course, we want our business website to be accessible 24/7. 

Businesses are in danger when their websites are down, and customers are up. Customers will leave, and your conversion rate will also be affected. Even giant companies like Amazon report losing $1.2 million when the site went through technical problems. You lose your trust as a business. 

So to avoid getting into this trouble, keep uptime as the most crucial parameter in your mind. The uptime guarantee of an ideal web hosting company should be 99%. Find such companies and partner with one of them “Do not think that slightly lesser than 99% would also work“. 

When you find a company with a 99% uptime guarantee, check if they have any backup plans. Back up here means any policy or processes to follow if the company fails to keep its word of 99%. The professional ones will have a refund policy for such cases.

• Loading Speed

Just like customers want your website to be accessible all the time, they also want it to load quickly. Customers move to another page when your page’s loading time exceeds 3 seconds. Slow pages also hurt the statistics of your website. When visitors leave the pages without a complete view, it increases the bounce rate. That leads to decreasing search engine visibility. Ultimately, you lose the business. Speed is the ranking factor of search engines. Google loves fast-loading websites.

So pick the hosting provider that helps you load your pages quickly. Let us explain how you can do it. 

1. Take some time to estimate the amount of monthly traffic on your website. You should also know the file types you will store. For example, will you be loading small images or high-resolution images? 
2. Moreover, you should know how many videos you will be displaying. Figure out all this stuff, and then think if the web hosting services provider you are considering can handle it? 
3. Be sure you know the amount of bandwidth that the company is providing. You will be able to guess better about how much traffic load your website can bear. If the bandwidth is high, a large number of people visiting the website simultaneously is no big deal. You may also land upon the providers who guarantee unlimited bandwidth. 
4. The disk space and processing power are also important. 10 GB storage and low RAM may not be enough for collecting massive user data and heavy media files. 
5. Check if the provider supports built-in caching. After the first visit, the browsers download the web page and return them on every other visit. It is an excellent tactic to decrease the loading time.

• Scalability

Do you plan or expect that your website will grow in the future? If yes, check how flexible a hosting company shows for the shift. Will they happily fulfill your request of upgrading from low plans to the higher plan? When running a website, there comes the point when you have utilized all your hosting resources. Unfortunately, you cannot avoid this stage. Moreover, switching the website from one host to another is not a good strategy. The migration process can consume a lot of time.

So best would be if you can retain the same provider. However, some companies provide VPS hosting and cloud hosting plans that allow you to choose and pay for extra resources. Good scalability is the best way to handle sudden surges in traffic due to promotions. You can expect such scenarios in the black Friday sale.

• Security

Cybercrimes are increasing every day. Online businesses are attacked more than single portfolio websites. Therefore, it has to be your top priority to keep the website safe from threats. Yes, thousands of security measures can help you with security. However, in the absence of a secure web hosting solution, these measures may not matter. As a result, websites will still be vulnerable to many threats.  

Do check if your provider offers all of these things: 

1. SSL certificate: It is the abbreviation of Secure Socket Layer. Implementing it would encrypt the data transmitted between the web server and the visitor’s browser. However, the data may have sensitive information, and it will have to pass through several computers to reach the browser. Hence third-party encryption is a critical feature. 
2. AntiVirus Scanner: It is critical, as it captures the malicious software and removes them immediately. Many types of malicious scripts can mess with your website.
3. Firewall: It is a filter system that keeps an eye on the network traffic. 
4. DDoS Mitigation: It is the abbreviation of Distributed Denial of Service. Sometimes, malicious hackers do not directly attack your website. They instead exhaust your server resources by constant consumption, which ultimately results in server crashes. The job description of DDoS is to avoid such situations.

• Backups

Thorough and frequent backups are an essential part of website maintenance. This is because the chance of getting hacked is always there, even if you implement every security measure in the world. There will be some crashes or failures, so backups are crucial. When you are in trouble, only a good backup policy of your hosting provider would be there to help. If things go wrong, simply revert to the older website versions. 

An ideal hosting provider would be the one who can completely restore your website and maintain the minimum downtime possible. This way, the losses will be minimal. Let us share a list of questions to help you decide if you should select or reject a company. Get their answers, and buy the plans if the answers satisfy you.

1. Do you conduct backups regularly?
2. Do you use the control panel to take the backups manually or use any tools that take the backups automatically?
3. Do we need the support staff for restoring the backups?

• The Customer Support

In the selection stage, many people do not give much importance to customer support. However, when they encounter troubles after picking a web host, they realize the importance of customer support. You may encounter something that you cannot resolve by yourself. So ensure that you get 24/7 customer support. Live customer service channels like chat, telephone, and email services are mandatory. If any of these channels are missing, the plan is not acceptable. In addition, support teams must be able to get back to you and resolve what you cannot fix. However, there should be comprehensive documentation available on the website.

• Sign Up & Renewal Price

You should know about two types of prices: sign-up and renewal prices. Most of the time, you will be paying different fees at the sign-up and renewal stages. Many companies tend to shoot up their renewal costs. Try to find the ones whose shoot-ups are justifiable.

You Might Also Like to Read: How Does Web Hosting Influence Website SEO Performance

Ready To Choose Your Web Hosting Partner?

In short, web hosting is a critical decision. Do not rush and invest some time to find the ideal one. We hope that now you can analyze the quality of web hosting service providers. We have mentioned all the necessary parameters to keep in mind. 

TheEmailShop provides versatile hosting plans for a diverse audience at reasonable prices. They perform best in Uptime, security, scalability, support, and other essential parameters.

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