Choosing a website hosting service is a very crucial decision for every website owner; your website will not be accessible if you don’t have hosting. You depend on your website for sales and support, lead generation and revenue, which means that you want it to be operational at all times. How is that possible? Through website hosting. Hence, it is necessary for you to do your research and choose a reliable and quality website hosting service that can offer your website 99.99% uptime. This can be done easily with the aid of the checklist outlined below:
Where will your website be hosted? If you are located in the US, but your website hosting service is based in Australia, your website will take time in loading for your US visitors. Likewise, you should bear in mind that search engines may make presumptions about your website depending on the location of your hosting service. As a general rule, always opt for a US-based website hosting service if your business is located there and ensure that its servers are also in the same country. Always ask the question because website hosting services often cut costs by hosting servers in other countries.
What kind of technical support is provided? Some website hosting services will only provide you with email support. This isn’t much of a bother until you suffer from any issues or technical glitches and need immediate assistance. It is better to choose a website hosting service like GoDaddy that offers telephonic customer support. This gives you the assurance that you can get in touch with a real person and get your problem resolved as quickly as possible rather than waiting for a response to your email. Also, technical support should be available 24/7 rather than from 9 to 5.
What backup strategies are offered? A good website hosting service will usually have backup strategies for dealing with faults. In order to get an idea of how the hosting service plans to cope with unexpected issues and events, you should ask them if they provide a backup for your data in case the site goes down and cannot be recovered.
How fast will the website load? There is no limit to the number of websites that can be hosted on a single server by a website service. However, the more websites are hosted, the slower the server will be. This means that the loading speed of all websites will be impacted. Therefore, you need to make an active decision and ask your hosting service about loading times. If your website takes a long to load, your customers will be driven elsewhere. Opt for professional hosting services like GoDaddy, HostGator, etc. that can offer you quick loading time, regardless of how heavy the page may be.
What is the cost? Last, but definitely not least, the cost is also a factor to be considered. Cheap website hosting services may sound good initially, but they come with restrictions. Reliable services offer you reasonable hosting packages that keep your website available and accessible at all times. Secondly, there are websites, such as bluehost.com, etc. that can help you get hosted without spending too much.