Renting a personal ‘real estate’ on the internet is could prove confusing for a small business owner. There are numerous web hosting companies that can rent you a space on the internet. Their service should allow you to focus your time and energy on other parts of the business while having a ‘healthy’ website.
But, not all are created equal.
Here is how to choose the best web hosting provider for your business website.
Understand The Types of Hosting
For small businesses that are not looking to get a high amount of traffic, shared hosting works. Shared hosting as the name implies splits server resources between you and other websites. Hence, the performance of your website sometimes suffers as websites on the server accumulate more resources. Shared hosting is cheaper than the other types and is well suited to new websites.
As your website grow and get more traffic, you need better hosting. The next level is VPS hosting, VPS stands for Virtual Private Server. Your VPS hosted websites still shares a server with other websites, but you are assigned more portions and have greater control of your resources than with the shared hosting.
Dedicated hosting is the crown of hosting services. A high-traffic, high-volume website using share hosting suffers, and sometimes face some problems with VPS hosting. With Dedicated hosting, your server ‘serves’ you alone and you have complete control.
Make a Traffic Estimate
In hosting your website, service providers charge you based on the amount of space you use as well as your bandwidth usage. Your bandwidth usage is low when the amount of people who visit your website (traffic) is low.
Take a good look at your business, is there possibility that there could be a surge in your traffic? Or perhaps you know you can only have a handful of monthly visitors.
An estimate of your potential traffic will go a long way in helping you choose the best hosting provider for your website. In brief, if your estimate is a handful of visitors per month, then a shared hosting could work for you. In contrast, if there is a potential of a surge or perhaps you are working to boost traffic to your website, then VPS or dedicated hosting should be your call.
Know Your Specific Needs
Most hosting providers have plans that have a long list of features at cheap prices. Resist the temptation of low prices to avoid paying for features you don’t or worse subscribing to a hosting plan that won’t serve you.
Hosting plans come with features like;
- Email accounts and inboxes
- Bandwidth and Data transfer
- Storage and RAM
- Security
- Support
- Uptime and Reliability
Take a good look at these features for every plan, check the limitations imposed on these features. Ensure you choose a plan that has limitations that work for your hosting needs. Otherwise, you could, for instance, end up with unlimited storage that another feature stops you from using.
Support Level
How much support time does your web hosting plan buy you?
What level of support do you get?
Some hosting providers limit their availability to you based on the package you are subscribed to. When trying to choose the best hosting provider for you, take a look at the customer support levels. Web hosting plans could give you access to certain customer service outlets like;
- Tickets
- Phone calls
Compare support levels between different providers as well as support levels between different plans of the same provider. Some hosting providers don’t support basic plan subscribers with phone calls while some don’t even give you access to call at all. You should also consider the customer service hours i.e. Is support 24/7?
In summary, to choose a web hosting provider, you need to understand the types of hosting and make an estimate of traffic you expect to your website per month. Also, you need to know your website needs so you don’t get surplus features and subscribe to a plan that gives you sufficient access to support.
Are you having problems finding the best web hosting for you?
Our ninjas at 63 WebStudio could take the stress of you, contact us now for a free consultation.
