Choosing a website theme is one thing, but choosing the right web hosting platform is entirely another. Let’s say you have purchased a website domain and managed to work your way through the Wordpress or SquareSpace templates to choose the best one for your business or blog. But the bigger question is – how do you choose the best hosting service?
Web hosting services are really important to any online business. Even more than an attractive website, a good hosting platform means that your website will be available to customers anytime with minimal downtime and problems. Hosting services also insure your content gets delivered to readers and customers’ browsers in a timely manner, which is really important if you have an online store. Web hosting services offer varying amounts of monthly data transfers, storage, email, and other features.
So how do you choose a good web hosting service? Following are some tips from PC Magazine to help you get started:
Understand which type of hosting service you need.
The four major web hosting plans offered by most service providers are: shared, virtual private server (VPS), dedicated hosting, and managed Wordpress hosting. Shared hosting is good for users who don't want to spend a lot of money on hosting packages and don't mind some of its traffic and data transfer limitations. VPS hosting is great for small businesses that want more power for higher flows of traffic, but don't want to deal with dedicated hosting's prices. Dedicated hosting is for enterprise business which is both powerful and pricey, so unless you have incredible amount of traffic and customers, this won’t be necessary. Managed WordPress hosting is for those who want to build their sites on the back of the popular WordPress content management system (CMS), but don't want to bother with a lot of the backend stuff.
What features do you want?
Are you interested in hiring a web designer to help you with the front end as well as the back end? Some web hosting services offer this benefit. Or you might want the convenience and reassurance of 24/7 customer support. According to PC Magazine, Companies like GoDaddy and Liquid Web have both knowledgeable and helpful customer support teams. When it comes to server operating systems, do you want Linux or Windows? Linux is typically the default option, but some services offer a choice of Linux or Windows hosting. If you have specific server-side applications that require Windows, such as SQL Server or a custom application written in .NET, then you need to make sure your Web host has Windows hosting.
Which ones have the highest rated uptimes?
The one thing you don’t want is your website crashing on a frequent or regular basis. Uptime ratings are important in a web hosting service – make sure they have good customer reviews on this. You can check out third-party websites to get ratings and reviews on the hosting services you’re considering.
The most important thing to remember is to do your research. Know the type of business you want to build, and plan your website hosting accordingly. There are plenty of web hosting resources out there to help you decide when the time is right. A few of the more popular web hosts include GoDaddy and Bluehost.