How to Choose a Web Host That Best Fits Your Needs
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A website is an indispensable part of any digital business' success in a world that is increasingly guided by technology. Whether it's a site packed with the most recent technology that requires a team of IT professionals to maintain or a single web page with contact information, your website is where you make that essential first impression. Fortunately, creating an inviting and well-functioning website doesn't have to be a time-consuming or costly project. With the knowledge of knowing how to choose a web host, you can project a public presence that's professional and polished like a site produced by an army of IT professionals, irrespective of whether you're running a large or small business.
What a Web Hosting Provider Does for You
The main job of a web hosting provider is to make your website go live on the internet so that individuals can easily access it.
In this respect, a web host provider will give you three major things:
- Server
This refers to the machine that hosts your website live on the internet. It is also responsible for supporting all the traffic coming into your website. Your provider hosts your website on one of their servers so that people can access it from the internet.
- Storage Space
Your website will have images, videos, texts, and other media files along with the code. Your hosting provider provides you with space where you can store all those files.
- Bandwidth/Connection
This is the connection to the internet that you are paying for. It can be tiered access or charge-per-used.
There is one more thing a web host provider can give to you but it is optional.
- Domain
This refers to your site's address that individuals type in their browser when going to your website. Your hosting provider will allow you to choose a domain name for your website and inform you if it's taken.
How to Choose a Web Host That Best Meets Your Needs
Here are some fundamental factors you should look out for before choosing a web host.
1. The Right Hosting Service
This might sound like an obvious consideration. However, it's worth noting that not all hosting services are made equal, depending on your high-level needs. Dependent on whether you have low or high traffic, there are two hosting services to consider:
- Shared Web Hosting
This is an environment where you share space with other users on a web server. It's more affordable and, especially if you're a beginner, have low traffic, or run a small business, because the cost of the server is shared among the users. However, you should also know that you're affected by the activities of your neighbors.
- Dedicated Web Hosting
If you've obtained high traffic levels, this is the web hosting service for you. It gives you total control over the server since you only store your website. Nevertheless, dedicated servers are a bit expensive. Individuals with high levels of traffic and those looking for complete control of their servers,01 use this.
2. Look at the Server Uptime Scores
Uptime refers to that time when your website is up and running. When Amazon went down for thirty minutes in 2013, it cost them 66,240 dollars per minute in revenue.
Suffice it to say, staying online is very crucial for your website. To do that, you'll need to check how stable your web host provider is. Although there are several monitoring tools you can use to track web hosts, generally, looking at their uptime scores is more than sufficient to tell whether a web host is stable or not.
And if you decide to use monitoring tools and have an IT staff internally, ensure they are equipped with the proper monitoring tools. This is because some hosts may not be compatible with specific tools.
3. Consider a Little Complexity
If you're a beginner or are running a small business, all this might sound complex. You might tend to shy away from web hosting services like Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services (AWS). However, you should not be scared because these are public cloud infrastructure providers, which means they have a lot of reliability figures and web server muscle.
And luckily, these public services have long lists of value-added partners. Some of these partners specialize in helping small businesses like yours to get up and running with some serious, robust web-serving infrastructure. Doing your research to know which of such partners suits your needs is of great importance.
4. Data Security
Trusting someone to host your site and content is not an easy task. Thereby, you should ensure that the chosen provider can protect you completely, offer an information redundancy system, as well as constant backups. That way, even with unforeseen or natural problems, your website will always be online and fully operational.
5. Loading Speed
Regarding SEO, Google will always prioritize the pages that load faster with the aim of offering the best experience for its users. It's crucial first to check if the web hosting service you're hiring provides a good loading speed. Stats also show that people are impatient, and around 47% of them expect websites to load in 2 seconds or less. Confirming that the web host's loading is okay thus helps you to keep potential clients.
6. Additional Services
It's also crucial to ensure that your web host provider offers additional services, such as regularly backing up your data, fixing your bugs, updating your server-side software, among others. Having these extra services saves you a lot of time when it comes to website maintenance.
7. Quality of Customer Support
Above all the other services they offer to ensure the success of your page, a web host service must also be efficient in helping you. Customer support is a significant factor, and the provider's availability makes all the difference between a crisis being resolved quickly or your site going offline for several hours.
Final Thoughts
It could be easy to get overwhelmed when choosing a web host since there are many factors to consider that eventually determine your website's success or failure. Nevertheless, you can choose the right hosting provider for your organization and your website with the above tips.
Have you found your preferable web host yet? Contact us today at Viral Solutions for up-to-date marketing ideas and news that will help boost your ROI. We want to see you succeed!
At Viral Solutions we are committed to seeing YOU succeed. It is our goal to grow your business with proven digital marketing strategies that will help your business for the long haul.
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