Choosing a hosting service for your website is crucial as it is a significant foundation to guarantee its success. You can improve your website performance with the right web host. If you make a bad decision, there will be all kinds of headaches to deal with.
This article will look at six factors to take into account when choosing a web hosting provider.
1. Uptime and reliability
It’s important for any website to stay online, and to make sure it’s online close to 100% of the time, you must check how stable your web host provider is.
The first thing to look at would be their uptime score. It’s a sufficient indicator of stability, although it’s not the only server monitoring tool out there that you can use. The standard uptime for the industry is 99.95%. Don’t choose anything below 99%. Those who opt for premium accounts will often be able to enjoy 99.99% uptimes or more.
2. Check the signup cost
You need to check how much it costs to sign up with the hosting provider and renew your subscription. It’s usually not the same price. The renewal price tends to be much higher if you originally signed up for a promotional or discounted offer.
Paying a higher price upon renewal is practically unavoidable unless you don’t mind switching web hosts every few years. The best route to take is choosing a host with a reasonable increase. If it costs $7 a month when you sign up, it shouldn’t jump to $14 or more when you renew your hosting plan.
Check the web host’s terms of service for their policy for renewal rates. They are usually at the bottom of the homepage. Search for the keywords “renew” or “renewal.”
3. Upgrade capacity
Today, there are all kinds of hosting plans. The go-to option for many business websites just starting out is shared hosting. If you’re like most, you expect your business to grow down the line, and your website will reflect that. You’ll start getting more visitors and perhaps outgrow shared hosting. Opt for a provider who will let you upgrade when the time comes.
Even the best shared hosting plans come with limited resources. Any website that gets more than 30,000 unique visitors will be forced to upgrade to VPS or dedicated hosting to accommodate all that bandwidth.
A web hosting platform that will allow you to upgrade is far better than looking for a new host and having to migrate your whole website.
4. Essential features
Most hosting providers offer all the basic features a site will need but always check for others, such as a file manager, one-click installer, and DNS management. Most hosting providers offer some kind of file management, but it’s usually limited. You can move files with FTP/SFTP access on your server safely.
The standard shared hosting plan’s processing power and RAM is more than sufficient for smaller websites. You can use YouTube, Google Docs, Imgur, and other third-party platforms to handle your videos, images, and documents when it comes to storage and bandwidth.
A one-click installer is very useful if you want to install WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, etc., easily and hassle-free.
5. Free trial or refund policy
A free trial will let you test the hosting service to see if it meets your requirements. If something goes wrong, a hosting provider with a reliable refund policy can ensure you don’t suffer financial losses or at least not excessive ones.
6. Backups
Backups are crucial for a website. Websites inevitably crash, fail, or fall victim to viruses. A solid backup policy will come in handy because you can go back to an operational website even if an incident occurs.
