If you really serious about starting your own online business you need a website. As you probably already know whether you are starting one page site or authority blog it needs to be stored and published in Internet. Web hosting service allows your website or webpage to be viewed.
It’s major for every temporary online manager to know how much of his success depends on a good hosting service. You need a website with many visitors and your web hosting provider connect your business with customers.
Choosing a good hosting provider is an investment in your business future.
The Main Points For You To Keep In Mind:
- Set up your goals
- Define your hosting needs
- Speed & Performance
- Security, Reliability & Uptime
You have to know a few simple things to make a right solution.
Discover 7 simple steps that will help you to make the right decision.
1. Faster, faster, faster
If you have watched the movie Speed with Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves, you had to know the speed is a very important thing. If you lose speed you can explode… at least – your business.
You need a hosting service who can ensure maximum speed for your current needs. When your new potential customer tries to enter your site you have to be sure that he will do it. There is no time for “loading….”.
You should choose servers with SSDs because those servers will load your website faster than spinning hard drives.
If you expect visitors from different places on Earth, you should trust to servers on multiple continents. With this server, you will have fastest connection in every time in everyplace.
It’s important to ask your hosting company about CDN (content delivery network). CDN decrease losses through proxy servers around the world. Some companies offer free CDN, in other cases, you should pay for this service.
The latest version of HTTP – HTTP/2 is a network protocol of our time. HTTP/2 is up to 10 times faster than HTTP. Your host should support it. But what is 10 times faster when you can make your site many, many times faster – hundreds of time. How? With a simple trick – caching options. You need choices like PHP 7 opcode caching, Memcached/Redis object caching, Nginx/Varnish full page caching, CDN, and ElasticSearch/Solr full text searching.
2. Protection and safety
I’m sure that you often read these words from Google: “This website may contain a virus and may harm your computer”. I know what you do when you see it, you choose next alternative. Exactly what you don’t want to make your potential customers. You lost money with every lost click. But how to protect your website from malware? How your hosting service could assure you that the hackers can’t attack you?
Your web host must be updated daily to keep software up-to-date. Check it out is they use the latest software like PHP, Apache, MySQL
Are there automatic CMS updates? Be careful – it’s safer to choose manual activation for new updates because you can lose important information if new updates start running in the middle of your job.
Your web host should be your guard dog – keep an eye on your traffic, block up all the suspicious enters and find all the vulnerabilities handling. Dog’s best helper would be Web Application Firewall but for full security you need backups. Hackers are always a step forward! It’s possible your host company make backups but there is no guaranty how often they do that.
A month is an optimal time for regular backups, more often is better. Insist for this service even this will cost you more, loses may be incomparably larger. Backups will restore your information with a simple click.
But hackers are not the only one who make problems. Like all computer components programs also crash without external intervention. Your host can offer you help – their server admin can log onto the server and find problem solution. Restart the machine it’s possible options in many cases but causes dead time. Nobody likes dead times! Prepare yourself for such a problems and prevent them before they really happen with good monitoring. This secure system will check server status and automatically will fix occurring problems. If you don’t want to rely on your web host can do it for yourself with programs like Uptimerobot, Pingdom and Uptrend
3. Help
You have to know that online business is like a new relationship – you have to be available 24 hours 7 days in a week. But as opposed to love connections someone else could do it instead of you, someone like your web host. This perfect helper is friendly, always ready to support you, work fast, 24/7, you can find him via phone, chat, messenger… Of course, this service will cost you something but will be worth it. Especially if words “hosting support” in your contract means a lot of issues
4. The site is ready
Your website is ready, you’re happy with the result but only one lefts. That spark that will give him life. It depends on your web host. The necessary software and complex of facilities to show your site to the world should be provided by your host. Even it’s simple site. Make a list of all important things that you want by your hosting company and ask:
- Necessary software to run your website?
- Do they allow plugins?
- CMS?
- Operating system?
- Database?
- Web server?
- Programming languages?
If you need special tools, do they assure them – SSL, Let’s Encrypt, Staging, FTP, SSH?
About services. If they provide:
- Domain registration?
- Email hosting?
- Database management?
- Control panel?
- Storage size? Because there are limits always independent of advertising word like “unlimited”.
- Free site migration?
5. The hosting service company
When choosing web host you choose a partner for a long period and you have to choose right. It’s easy to find out more about the company.
- How solid the company is? Is it small, local provider or a big corporation? What are their advantages?
- Check their site – is it easy to use it, clear and explanatory?
- Read About us section – what’s company story, goalsand philosophy? Do they invest moneyin events like WordCamp, open source projects or some other enterprises?
- Look how they respond to their clients in social networks – how fast, do they keep friendly language even for the bad comments?
- How does their office look like?
- Their employers – are they look happy?In general – company who take cares of employers, take cares of customers
- Is host company eco-friendly, for example – what they do with their carbon footprint? How they save electricity?
6. Payment
The payment isn’t the main when you choose web host but it will be good if you pay as much as the service costs – no more no less. Maybe you have chosen a hosting company because you like their advertising with happy faces who ensure you that you receive everything in a lower price? Although, please, read the little letters to understand what “everything” means for this company. For how long is also a good question to ask? Are there any limits, perhaps “everything” but for basic needs? It’s possible lower price applies only if you pay for long period.
That’s it! If you take the time, follow these steps you will select the best web host for you. The time spent will pay you back!
