Web Hosting Choices and Solutions

What is Web Hosting?

Web hosting is the business of hosting websites for individuals or organizations in a virtual server. It’s important to choose an affordable, reliable and scalable web hosting provider. Web hosting packages have various features to fit the varying needs of different users or websites.

They include a control panel, a mailing list, a simple website builder tool, the ability to easily develop online stores and support at different levels. Support can come in the form of a live chat or phone call. Opt for an affordable hosting solution you can pay for with ease. Virtual private servers offer flexible, dedicated servers at lower costs. They’re ideal for tech-savvy users.

Choosing the Right Hosting Solution

According to Forbes, hackers penetrate over 30,000 websites daily. As an example, Home Depot, Target and BlueCross BlueShield are some sites that have fallen victim of hacking over the last couple of years. Although no single perfect solution exists to prevent hacking, a good web hosting company that’s reliable and reputable can help with data recovery in case of a security breach.

A good web hosting provider offer data backup services to a remote serve for continuous business operation and fast recovery in the event of a successful breach of security. Businesses experience reduced revenue when their websites are down because customers are not able to access their store and make purchases. Amazon lost about $66,240 every minute in 2013 when its website was down for about half an hour.

Apart from reduced revenue and security breaches, regular website downtimes also reduce its search rankings. That means content neither gets indexed nor accessed. As a result, the website and business at large can be affected negatively. This explains the need to choose the best web hosting provider for your website.

When choosing the right hosting solution for your personal or business website, consider the following factors:

1. Determine the Right Hosting Solution for You

Understand your business to determine the right web hosting solution for you. For instance, a website with 24-hour live streaming, video blogging and the ability of users to register and upload videos require a hosting solution with many features.

2. Opt for the Right Hosting Package

Although shared hosting is cost-effective, it slows the response time of your site. On the other hand, virtual private servers are more costly, but offer high web performance with faster response times and better customer experience.

3. Go through Web Hosting Reviews

Browse reputable review websites to find out what people are saying about various web hosting providers before choosing one. Focus on persistent complaints and how the host providers respond to them. Choose a company that seems to solve complaints and deal well with unhappy clients.

4. Choose the Right Bandwidth Amount

Choose bandwidth that supports growth of your business at least for the next 5 years or so. Ascertain that the web hosting provider doesn’t lock its customers to specific bandwidths and charge extra fees when the need to revise an existing hosting plan arises.

5. Get Value for Your Money

Cheap hosting can end up being costly. Most often you get what you pay for. Pay for good customer service, fast servers, consistent uptimes and an association with many professional websites.

6. Don’t Buy Before You Read the Terms of Service

Read the terms of service and only choose the web hosting provider if you find its conditions acceptable. Check out its refund policy as well.

7. Contact Customer Support

Contact customer support to test their attitude and response time before opting for a specific web hosting solution. Test online chat, email and phone contact systems.

8. Is there a Backup Plan?

Choose a web hosting provider that offers a viable backup plan for your website. And, find out what the plan involves and if you find it satisfactory.

9. Assess Security Features Provided

With increased security threats, you want to be sure that measures are in place to protect your website from breach attempts. Look out for secure sockets layer to protect your information from unauthorised parties.

10. Experience

Choose a web host solution that has been in the industry for at least 2 years. Avoid new guys on the block without much experience in offering web host solutions.

Standard Web Hosting

Standard web hosting provides fast, secure and well-maintained servers for hosting optimized HTML or PHP websites. They’re cheap and often shared with other hosting providers. This type of hosting is deal for new businesses with basic needs for hosting.

Managed Web Hosting

This type of web hosting offers advanced web hosting features for businesses with high demands and growth needs. The servers are fast, reliable and scalable with increased uptimes. They’re more costly than standard web hosting packages.

Custom Web Hosting

Custom web hosting provides private server setups for businesses or individuals with extremely high hosting needs. Customers have access to multiple server clusters with auto healing and scaling features, including single server setups for varying user needs.

Contact us to help you choose the best web hosting solution for your business or personal website.