Evaluate hosting providers on key factors

Since your website is likely a first experience a potential customer will have with your business, having that website up and running flawlessly is crucially important. Choosing the right website hosting provider can mean the difference in the success of your online presence, and your business. With so many options available, it’s important to evaluate a hosting provider on several key factors when making your decision. 

Any website hosting provider will tell you they’re the best option and have all the best offerings. This makes it important for you to review them based on their reliability and customer service, as well as the technical aspects of scalability, uptime guarantees, and server options. 

Reliability

Reliability is the foundation of a good hosting provider. You want a host that ensures your website is consistently accessible to visitors without frequent downtime. Look for providers with a track record of reliability and uptime performance. One of the best ways to measure or analyze a website hosting provider’s reliability is through their reviews on Google. As with any business, the reviews are just a opinion of another customer, but if there are continuing issues of downtime or poor customer service, that hosting provider is likely one to pass on.

Scalability

As your website grows, so should your hosting capabilities. Choose a host that offers scalable solutions, allowing you to easily upgrade resources such as CPU, RAM, and storage space as your traffic and data requirements increase.

As your business continues to grow and evolve, your website will grow along with it. That website growth can be in both the size of the site and the amount of traffi coming to the site. You’ll want to confirm that the hosting provider you select has the ability to increase storage space and bandwidth as needed. 

Starting out you might keep your site to the very basics of security, but as time progresses you might want to explore those additional security items. So when selecting a hosting provider, be sure to confirm they can add on additional security features as needed. Security for websites advances day after, so also be sure to confirm that they are staying on top of the latest security measures to take with your site. 

Uptime Guarantee

Check the hosting provider’s uptime guarantee, which indicates the percentage of time your website is expected to be up and running. Look for providers with high uptime guarantees backed by service level agreements (SLAs). Oftentimes you’ll see hosting providers offer 99.9% uptime. At first glance that sounds impressive. The site is only down then .1% of the time. If you do the math, however, that .1% of the time equates to over 8 hours of downtime a year. You instead should look for a host offering 99.99% uptime. And more importantly than just their claim of uptime, they should also be able to provide statistics and figures showing their uptime. 

Almost more importantly than uptime, is their response to downtime. It’s inevitable that a server or a site will be down at some point. Because of this, be sure to confirm what they’re internal processes are for getting a server and website back online when it goes down. 

Server Options (Storage Space and Bandwidth) 

Consider your website’s storage and bandwidth requirements. Choose a host that offers sufficient storage space for your files, databases, and media content. Additionally, ensure adequate bandwidth to handle your website’s traffic volume without slowdowns or data transfer limitations. You’ll likely need to know the current size of your website, and make sure that the allot storage space that the hosting provider has available for the site is at least double the size of the size. Oftentimes, when weekly backups are made (which the host should also be able to do) the site can have significant increases in size as that backup is being made. 

You’ll also want to have an abundance of bandwidth available. You might only average a few gigabytes of bandwidth a month, but in the event of peak seasons or sales, that could easily skyrocket. If you run out of bandwidth, your site can be essentially unavailable to the world wide web.

Customer Service 

Like any industry, customer service is a must for a website hosting provider. Excellent customer service is essential for addressing technical issues, resolving queries, and getting timely support when needed. Take the time to confirm how the hosting provider handles customer service, their reviews on customer service, and even submit some tickets or claims to see how quickly they reply. 

You’ll want to check to make sure that the hosting provider also offers technical support in your native language and ideally in your country. While investigating their customer service and support, you can also find valuable information about how long they take to respond to issues and get them fully restored. Hiring a website hosting provider and then waiting until something goes wrong is a horrible way to find out what kind of support they offer. 

You likely are not a computer or server computer wizard. The customer service technicians that you’ll be working with should be a whiz at computers and servers and anything nerdy like that. You can ask pointedly if their customer service technicians are actually trained and experts in the field or if they are simply reading from a manual. If they are just reading from a manual, I highly advise looking for another host. 

Ensure a secure hosting experience

When evaluating website hosting providers, prioritize reliability, scalability,uptime guarantees, server options, and customer service. By choosing a host that excels in these areas, you can ensure a seamless and secure hosting experience for your website. There is no shortage to the number of hosting providers available today. Be sure to take the time necessary to interview different hosting providers and choose the one that will best support you and your business. Your website is possibly going to be the first experience a new customer might have with you and your business, take the time to make sure the hosting of that website is perfect.