Behind every good website is good hosting, as without good hosting, you will not have a good website – so the two really do go hand in hand.
Whilst many people can understand the need to spend some serious money on a website, the hosting often gets forgotten, with the temptation to save a few pounds here and there overtaking the necessity to actually spend the money on what you need. This theory though, is totally flawed, as if your website is down more than up, is incredibly slow or just simply keeps failing, your potential customers will not wait around and why should they?
So, we offer 6 ways to choose the right hosting company to make sure that your amazing website is always available!
Location
From an SEO point of view, having your website hosted in the country you want to rank for is incredibly important and from a customer service point of view, it is also very important, as if you need to contact them you want it to be easy. Make sure the servers where your website will sit are hosted in the country you want most of your business from and always check out this is the case, as you do not want to contact a company only to find their hosting is actually many thousands of miles away from where you thought it would be.
Reliability
A car that does not start 10% of the time is going to make you late for work and the kids late for school, and of course, leave you frustrated and very poor if you have to miss work because of it. So, if your hosting is only running for 80 or 90% of the time, keeps going down and is just so slow that your site is not even worth looking at, your business is going to suffer, which is why reliability is so important when choosing the right hosting company. Of course, until you are hosting with them you might not fully know, but you can research and look at online reviews before you make a choice, just so that you can avoid seriously bad hosting companies.
Type
We are going to throw this one in here as it is something that is so often ignored. If you have a large site that gets a lot of traffic, shared hosting is not for you, so you need to be considering dedicated hosting to make sure your site stays online and can cope with the demand. Equally if you only get 100 people a month then fitting on a reseller shared server is totally fine, as this should be more than adequate. The point here is to make sure that the hosting you are on is right for your needs, which in turn will help with our final point of price but more importantly will make sure your site is online all of the time.
Recommendations
Anyone that has a bespoke / custom website needs hosting and whilst this may be organised through the web design company that built the website, you can often ask fellow business owners, friends and family who they might be able to recommend through personal experience. Ask around and get some feedback from other people, as word of mouth recommendation is probably the most positive indicator you can get that something is going to be good and worth using.
Customer Service
What happens if it all goes wrong? What happens if you make a mistake and need a bit of help? What happens if something needs sorting and the clock has gone past 5pm? So many questions that all come down to one thing – how good is the customer service from your potential hosting companies? This is really important especially if you are a small business that just does not have the internal workforce or expertise to manage things yourself, so it is important that you work with a hosting company that will help you when you need their help.
Price
Although we mention price, we do not mean that you should always just go for the cheapest option, but equally, there is no point paying for something that is either just not right for you or is well outside of your budget. Make sure that you understand the type of hosting you need, as we discussed earlier and then work on getting comparative quotes, otherwise you are just going to end up with many different prices and often for many different types of hosting, making it totally impossible to compare and end up with the best deal.
