Hosting That Keeps Your Website Secure and Ready to Grow
As a small business owner you need more than just a place to “sit” for your website. Good website hosting is the starting point to keeping your site secure, updated, backed up, and available when customers need it. The overall security is for your website, your business, and even your customers.
Website hosting can be very confusing. Terms like SSL, dedicated IP, bandwidth, backups, malware protection, and server resources are thrown around and become overwhelming. The right hosting platform or website hosting provider should simplify all of that.
The best website hosting platform for a small business will take care of the technical aspects of hosting, provide reliable support, and offer systems that grow with your website over time.
Hosting Provider Should Be Able To Handle the Technical Details
Small business owners need to run their business. They should not have to become website hosting techs in order to keep their website safe and online.
A good hosting platform or provider will be there to help set up the technical pieces that matter, such as:
- SSL certificate
- Dedicated IP
- Website backups
- Security monitoring
- WordPress system updates
- Malware protection
- Server management
- Storage and bandwidth
This allows you to focus on running your business, not spending your time keeping your hosting organized, updated, and working.
If any of those terms are confusing that is totally understandable. Website hosting has a lot of technical and advanced pieces to it. Rarely does a small business owner need to know the details of each one.
We have other blog articles that can help simplify things like SSL certificates and dedicated IP addresses in more detail. If you really want to learn more check out any of the website hosting blogs we have.
Make Sure the Support Is What You’re Looking For
Hosting support matters. A lot. This is especially when something goes wrong.
A good small business hosting provider should have tech support options that are easy to reach, easy to understand, and able to fix any problem. Ideally, that support should be based in your country and, at a minimum, speak your language fluently.
It’s also worth noting that when we say “speak your language fluently” this means also speaking in simple terms that you’ll understand and being able to explain things in a way you, a non-technically trained server administrator, can understand.
You should not sit on hold for an hour, get bounced between departments, or read through confusing technical instructions just to get a simple answer. The hosting providers’ tech support should be easy to reach and easy to follow. And it should always result in the problems getting fixed.
Good hosting support should:
- Respond in a reasonable amount of time
- Explain things in plain English
- Understand your website setup
- Be able to actually fix problems
- Help you prevent issues, not just react to them
Cheaper hosting options work great in the yearly budget. But the chances of added stress coming on board can make that saving irrelevant at the end of the year. Poor support can end up costing you time, money, sales, and trust from potential customers.
Choose Hosting That Can Grow With Your Business
Your website may start small. A few pages, a contact form. And that is perfectly fine. I know a certain web design company whose first website was much like that 🙂
For many small business websites, the starting point is as a brochure-style site and a home page, about page, services page, and contact page. A clean, simple, modern website can be exactly what a business needs. To start, at least.
As your business grows, your website may need to grow right along with it. You might need to add in things like:
- More storage space
- More bandwidth
- More pages
- More forms
- More images or videos
- E-commerce
- A blog or resource center
- More advanced security
- Faster performance support
- Online payments
- A store
- Event registration
- Appointment booking
- Membership features
- Client portals
- Donation forms
- Custom forms
- Searchable resources
- Advanced integrations
The hosting platform you work with must be able to expand as your business does.
Be Careful With Free Hosting Options
There are a lot of free website hosting options available. For very small, temporary projects, that may seem appealing.
Free platforms are likely to lack the things a growing business needs. They often come with limited support, weaker security, less flexibility and overall performance.
These free or very low-cost hosting options are often shared hosting environments. With these providers, your site could be on the same server and using the same resources as many other websites.
If another site has bad code, gets heavy spam, or has a malware attack, it can affect the performance or security of other sites on that same server. Your website.
Without the proper security and server management in place, shared hosting tends to create problems that are outside your control.
This doesn’t mean all basic shared hosting is bad, but it must be set up extremely sescurly. The odds of that are never great. The majority of shared hosting we have seen has been far below what any small business would want.
A better option? Virtual Private Servers. At Full Scope Creative, all of the websites we host are on VPS. If one site gets infected with malware, only that site will be compromised. Everything else on the server is safe and partitioned off.
If your website is for a personal project or a hobby, shared hosting and those lower costs might be a viable option. If you’re looking to run and grow your business, you’ll want to find another option.
What Makes a Good Hosting Platform for Small Business?
Knowing some of the key things to look for in a website hosting provider, and some of what to avoid, what makes for a good hosting provider?
A good website hosting provider for a small business will include all of these:
- Reliable uptime
- Strong security
- SSL certificate
- Dedicated IP
- Regular updates
- Backups
- Standard security
- Helpful support
- Room to grow
- Ability to support advanced features
- Plain-English communication
- A team that understands small business websites
The best website hosting platform might not be the cheapest one. It will be the one that helps keep your website safe, stable, and ready for what your business needs. The right hosting provider for your small business will have the tech support and communication that you need.
Full Scope Creative Hosting Is Worth Considering for Small Businesses
The website hosting plans offered by Full Scope Creative are built with small businesses in mind.
Our hosting covers the technical and confusing parts so our clients never need to worry about them. All of our plans technical aspect like:
- SSL certificates
- Dedicated IP address
- WordPress system updates
- Weekly backups
- Security monitoring
- Virtual Private Servers
Along with those, we are also easy to reach. If there ever is an issue, we’re just a phone call, text message, or email away and our team will step in. Anytime we communicate with our clients about their hosting, it is always in plain, simple english.
Don’t get me wrong, we can speak geek, we just much prefer plain English.
Our hosting is set up on a VPS system that is managed and watched by the best techs and nerds around. That gives our small businesses clients a stronger, more reliable hosting setup than any bargain hosting options.
Pick Hosting That Makes Your Life Easier
The best website hosting provider for your small business will make your life easier. Never more complicated and stressful.
Look for hosting options that keep your website secure, include the needed technical aspects, offer you full support, and grow with your business. A small brochure-style site today can develop into a larger, more advanced site tomorrow. It is worth choosing a hosting solution that can support both.
For small businesses that want hosting without the headaches, Full Scope Creative is here to help. If you need help choosing the right hosting for your small business website, chat with Full Scope Creative. We can help review the options you have, and we promise to never speak geek.