How to Choose a Web Host for Your Business
Choosing a good web designer is important. Your site is your digital face—it needs to look amazing and be aesthetically pleasing to people who engage with it. But it’s not the only thing your website really needs. If you want your digital face to be findable, load quickly, and be effective, then you also need a good web host.
Thankfully, figuring out how to choose a web host for your business isn’t difficult. But it does require you to know your business well, both in terms of your business needs and your goals for the future.
Don’t neglect this part of your website. Building a great website on a poor web hosting company is like building a house on sand. But pick a great web host, and you can expect a solid, high-performing website. Here’s what to consider.
Determine Your Business Needs
To understand what kind of web hosting provider you need, it’s essential to know your own business’s needs. That way, you can match up with an ideal web host much more easily. Here’s what to consider:
Website Type
The type of site you’re running makes a difference. Is it a simple site with more text than anything? Is it photo- or video-heavy? How much interactive content is there? A simple text-based blog will have different needs to a photographer’s portfolio website, for example.
Website Traffic
How much traffic are you expecting to arrive on your site? Are you a local business, or does your traffic come from across the globe? Figure out the estimated number of visitors so you can make sure to choose a capable web host.
Storage Space
Consider how much disc space your website’s files take up. This includes things like all content files (that aren’t being stored on CDNs), databases, and emails. Also think about any anticipated growth.
Types of Web Hosting to Choose From
PIcking the right type of web hosting is important. It may be tempting to just go with one that fits your budget, but there’s much more to it than that. Here are your choices:
Shared
This is the most affordable of all web hosting types, but there is a downside. Resources are shared between many websites hosted on the same server. This means that if another website gets a big spike of traffic, all the resources are pulled to them and leave none for you, increasing downtime and slowing your page loading speed.
Dedicated
Dedicated hosting is as it sounds—you get an entire server to yourself for your website. No sharing resources with others, you have your own resource stash that’s available only for your website. It’s more expensive than shared, but vastly more reliable and stable.
VPS
VOS (Virtual Private Server) creates a “virtual” server on a bigger server, essentially creating your own small space that gets allocated its own resources. It’s an affordable option and falls somewhere between shared and dedicated in terms of performance.
Cloud
Cloud hosting is the latest type to become popular. It’s pricey, so a lot of people will automatically avoid it. But for that price, you get an amazingly stable, reliable, flexible, and scalable web host. So if you’ve got the budget, cloud hosting is the best choice.
Key Web Hosting Factors to Consider
If you’re looking for a great web hosting provider, here are the factors you should be ticking off your list. It doesn’t matter what kind of business you run—these are non-negotiable.
Uptime
The gold standard in the industry is 99.9% uptime or above. Don’t be fooled when a web host says they have 99% uptime. They’re below average!
Security
Your web host should be protecting your website against security threats. They should be able to detect, eliminate, and fortify the website against the same kind of threat in the future. Various security measures may be implemented, such as malware scanning, SSL certificates, firewalls, and regular backups.
Customer Care
Your host should be available if you need help. Check what kind of customer service options they have. Most will have email and phone support during the day, but switch to a chat function at night so there’s always someone available.
Scalability
All businesses should be aiming to grow. You need to know that your web host can grow with you… Or you may have to waste time and money migrating your website later to a different web host that can handle a growing business.
Value for Money
You want to be getting the best value for the money you’re paying to the website hosting company. Obviously, the one you choose will need to fit into your own budget (or the business’s budget), but you also need to be getting exactly what you need for that price.
Check Reviews and Reputation
You can read everything the web host sends you and scout around their website for hours. But the real place to find out everything you need to know about a web hosting company is to look at the reviews. Real people, real experiences, giving you real knowledge about the provider and their services.
You can find reviews on forums, industry-related websites, and social media. Spend some time on this—it could be the most valuable part of your research process. Also, don’t just read a few. You’ll need to spend time scouring and finding overlapping comments and complaints so you know what the common issues are.
Look for feedback that’s specifically related to what your business needs. If you’re expecting high volumes of traffic but you find a number of reviews mentioning that their site’s can’t handle high traffic volumes, then it’s probably not worth going ahead.
Conclusion
Learning how to choose a web host for your business doesn’t have to be an intimidating process. As long as you know your business and you’re well aware of your needs, you can find a good web host that’s got what you need.
Don’t neglect this step and just choose a host because they’re cheap. Trust us—putting time, effort, and thought into your web host will serve you well in the long run. You’ll thank yourself later!
About the Author
Paul Wheeler runs a web design agency that helps small businesses optimize their websites for business success. He aims to educate business owners on all things website-related, at his own website, Reviews for Website Hosting.
