Important Factors To Consider Before Selecting A Web Host For Your Business

Choosing the right hosting company for your websites can be a difficult endeavor, especially if you have little experience in this domain.

When you need to choose a hosting service, I think most of us will look at price first and then at host specification packages. Although the price is also an important factor, however, it should not be the first.

It is important to choose a professional web hosting service for your website as long-term results will be influenced by the quality of these services. Here are some criteria that will help you make the best choice of hosting company and package that best suit your needs.

Choosing a hosting service just because it is the cheapest is like we hire a tutor for our child based solely on price/time practiced. Logic tells us that the main factor would be the level of tutor training and not the price itself. If we choose the tutor who has the lowest price, then we risk losing the money we invest, but also time, and our child does not acquire anything from training. Then, on which aspects should we look when choosing a hosting service for our business. Below is a small tutorial on how we can find a suitable hosting.

Service Packages Price

Obviously, price is an important factor in choosing a hosting package. Frequently, hosting companies offer discounts and promotions, so it’s good to do a little market research before choosing.

Be careful at companies who are seeking long-term contracts. On one hand, you could save money, on the other hand, it is advisable to book your freedom to change the hosting company.

How To Manage

If you are not familiar with web programming, search hosting packages that give you the possibility to administrate your site with dedicated interface (cPanel, Webmin etc). Some applications are used in cPanel, for example, is free and offers a lot of facilities. Do not forget to ask for their installation when discussing about purchasing a hosting package. It is also best to choose a hosting service that provides FTP access to easily upload files and edit CGI scripts.

Bandwidth Limitations

Study carefully the limitations of bandwith of different hosting packages and make sure you will not be required to pay for additional traffic if your site will have a higher number of visitors (although many hosting companies has in their offer that the traffic is unlimited).

Number of accounts per server

If shared server, it is advisable to know the number of sites with which you share the server. As if there are many sites on a server, the greater the chances of your site to load more slowly. Compare the number of accounts on a server with the number of accounts used by other hosting companies to have a starting point to negotiate. For full access to server resources would better be up to 100 accounts per server.

For dedicated servers, ask for details about the possibility and conditions that can be done to upgrade the memory, CPU, hard disk etc. Do not forget to ask about your website’s downtime in the event of such upgrade.

Data security and information

If your website business is on transactions involving the payment of goods or services, you must have SSL support (Secure Sockets Layer) to ensure safe transfer of information on bank cards between users and websites.

Find a hosting company that has the option to daily back up the server. Thus, in case of irreparable damage, avoid losing database and your website’s content. This is very important!

Support Services

Find out what kind of technical support is the hosting company offering. 24/7 type support and rapid response are perfectly reasonable demands – you can test the support at midnight, for example, to check how fast and how well they are responding. A professional technical consultant must be courteous, calm, and polite and provide clear explanations on the spot, answers and relevant questions.

Reliability

A capable hosting service is useless if you have frequent interruptions. We talked about uptime and its importance above. It is true that we cannot ask for a 100% uptime because it is not reasonable. Even big companies like Google or Yahoo are not always available. Instead we refer to those hosting companies that do not have effective solutions for the moments of downtime, and as a result our website will suffer from frequent failures.

On the other hand, there are hosting companies that have solutions to prevent situations that lead to downtime, act quickly when a problem occurs and we cannot grasp that there the problem (many hosting companies use a system of backup servers which is running automatically when main ones are facing servers). To be sure that what they write on the website is true, you could ask the hosting company about their backup system. Do they have backup methods and qualified staff to respond quickly in case of malfunction? Power failure, network bottlenecks, faulty hard drive are just some of the realities that can happen on any server. What safety precautions does the hosting company have?

Security

Finally we are talk about the security of the hosting service, though is not less important. In an environment saturated by the daily threats and emerging new ones, security service host is an important aspect that should be taken into account. Therefore you should make sure that the hosting service has elected new safeguards against spam threats and trained staff available 24 hours a day to solve security problems.

When it comes to our business, it is better to prevent than to repair. As much as we would get to pay for the preventions, it is worth the price because when it comes to repair costs are much higher.