Top 6 Factors to be Considered While Choosing Your Web Hosting Provider – YourLastHost.com
Introduction
With the increase in the digital and e-commerce world, many businesses are taking their business online, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. But launching your e-commerce website is just not enough for its overall success. To make your online business successful and keep it up and running 24/7, you need to host your website with a suitable website hosting provider.
You must be wondering how to choose a web hosting provider for starters?
Well, there are several web hosting services available in the market, but choosing the one that meets your business’s needs and requirements makes the actual difference.
For example, for smaller websites and small businesses, shared hosting works the best.
Choosing the right shared website hosting solution will provide an excellent user experience to your customers, which is very beneficial in the long run.
Thus, to build a reputable online presence, you must choose the right web hosting service.
This article discusses some essential factors you must consider for doing the same.
Top 6 factors to consider while choosing a web hosting service for your online business
With several web hosting services available in the market today, opting for the right hosting company can become even more challenging.
Here is the list of factors you must consider when looking out for a web hosting provider for your online business.
1) Availability / Average uptime
Uptime is the time your business is online and available to the customers. Ideally, your online business should be available to your customers 24/7.
Website downtime can significantly affect its conversion rate and decrease the traffic on your website, leading to losing potential customers.
When at one end of the spectrum, an accessible website helps gain customer trust. An inaccessible website and frequent downtime create a poor reputation in front of Google and your customers.
Your website should be able to cater to your user’s needs in every situation. To do so, you must choose a web hosting provider that offers a 99.99% uptime guarantee.
It is advisable not to choose a hosting service that offers uptime lower than even 99%.
2) Security
With the increase in cybercriminal and hacking activities, it is essential to keep your website safe and secure.
The web hosting solution you choose must constantly monitor the business and provide high-priority security services to meet the PCI requirements.
It is vital to choose a hosting service that cares about your business’s and your customers’ security and prevents it from any sort of online attacks.
To ensure server security, it is required to ensure the server meets the PCI Compliance, runs on the latest software, and provides a secure shopping platform to all your customers.
To attain robust security for your website, the right hosting solution must:
- Prevent/ block web attacks
- Detect and clean up malware
- Provide auto-updates
- Provide regular backups
- Provides firewalls
Ensure that the hosting provider you choose takes all the vital security measures like SSL Certificates, Dedicated firewalls, SiteLock, 2 Factor Authentication, IP whitelisting, and more.
3) Scalability
Scalability is an essential factor to consider if you are looking to grow your online business and upgrade its plans.
In situations like the Black Friday sales or new product launches, you might expect a comparatively larger traffic surge. If you are not occupied with the required server capacity, your website can experience downtime because of the overload or high traffic spikes, which is a big NO!
So, it is very critical to choose a hosting solution that is flexible and scalable enough to provide you with the required additional resources when needed or upgrade your subscription at the time of need.
4) Backup Services
The way a web hosting company handles backups plays a vital role in keeping your website secure.
Your website’s data is an essential asset of your eCommerce business, and losing it could mean putting months and years of hard work at risk.
The right web hosting company must provide regular data backups, which can come in handy under unfortunate circumstances.
While choosing the hosting provider, pay attention to the following attributes:
- Continuous and regular data protection
- Daily automatic code and database backup
- Retained data backup period
- Redundant, secure backup systems
5) Loading Speed
No one wants to spend over 3 seconds waiting for the website to load in this quick and impatient era. Customers value and trust websites with high speed.
Your website’s loading speed very much impacts your business’s success.
There are several options available at the hands of your customers to choose if your website takes too long to load.
So to not lose your potential customers and avoid them bouncing to your competitors, you must definitely consider the speed your hosting provider provides when choosing one.
A website with a faster response time means lesser loading speeds, which is an important factor considered by Google to rank websites at SERP.
Thus, loading speed is an important metric to consider, which provides customer satisfaction, improves conversion rates and SERP rankings.
6) Technical Support
A responsive and reliable technical support is much needed when you can’t solve the problem yourself.
In unfortunate situations where you might face server error or your website experiences downtime, you could require immediate technical support from your web hosting provider to solve the issue.
Nothing’s more frustrating than having to wait for hours or days to get a response for such critical issues that need to be taken care of right at that moment.
A delayed response can negatively impact your website by losing sales or SERP positions.
Thus, it is required to choose a hosting company with an excellent and dedicated support team, responding promptly whenever required.
Conclusion
Website hosting is an essential aspect of a successful business, and it is critical to select the right web hosting service wisely.
Apart from the factors mentioned above, you can also consider a few additional factors like the price, features offered, storage and bandwidth, etc.
Though choosing a hosting solution seems like a time-consuming process, we hope this article facilitates the process for you.
Let us know in the comments section below if you find the article helpful or if you wish to add more additional factors. We’d be delighted to hear from you.