7 Factors to Consider When Choosing a Web Hosting Service for Your Site

Choosing the right web hosting service for your website is always a big decision that ensures the success of your business. The right web host can improve and boost your site’s overall performance. Choose wrongly, and you may end up facing all kinds of headaches and expenses.

Not only does web hosting impact your website’s SEO performance, but it also affects the site’s speed, security, and more. We will discuss these in more detail shortly.

How to Choose a Web Host for Your Website

Whether you’ve used a web hosting service before or not, you must understand specifically what you’re looking for in a hosting plan. A web host provides you with a place to store your site’s data and essential files. It also allows you to deliver your content to your target audience through their browsers.

With that said, here are seven critical factors to consider when looking for a web hosting service:

1. Understand Your Website’s Needs

If you do a quick Google search, you will find hundreds of web hosting service providers out there. But you must also note that each hosting service covers different client needs and has its own strengths and weaknesses.

As such, you want to go for the hosting service provider that covers the needs of your website. And to do so, you must first know the needs of your website. “What type of website are you building?”, “How much traffic do you expect?” These are just a few of the questions you should ask yourself when looking for a web host provider.

Remember, the more detailed you can be regarding your website, the easier it will be when deciding the hosting provider to use.

2. Server Reliability/Uptime Scores

In 2013, Amazon went down for about 30 minutes. During this time, the eCommerce giant lost about $66,240 per minute in revenue. And the same has happened at least once or more to some of the giant companies we have today, and they suffered great losses.

Suffice to say that staying online is critical for your website. But to do that, you must consider the server reliability and uptime scores of your web hosting service provider.

Fortunately, there are many server monitoring tools you can use to track your web host and gauge its reliability.
The industry-standard uptime today is 99.95%, which is good. We advise that you avoid any hosting service with uptime below 99%. Of course, premium accounts offer even better server stability, where some manage up to 99.99% uptimes or even better. Overall, you always want to check the hosting service’s uptime to ensure you’re getting good value for your money.

3. Security

Any good windows hosting should have the resources and means to offer its clients a secure web infrastructure. This should come complete with the latest security updates and active security protocols to hold off any cyber threats.

Top-of-the-line security features guarantee that your website will be safe from external malicious factors, such as hacking, viruses, and worm attacks.

Small businesses are particularly more vulnerable due to their limited resources, forcing them to compromise on some security features. Therefore, you want to ensure the web hosting service you intend to use has all the security features and updates to keep your site safe.

4. The Signup and Renewal Price

When looking for a hosting service, there are two different prices you must consider. These are the signup prices and renewal prices.

In most situations, the initial amount you pay for your plan isn’t always the same as the renewal price for the same plan. More often than not, your renewal price will always be higher, depending on the type/s of offers and discounts you were given during the signup process.

Therefore, you want to go for the web host that offers a reasonable price for its services. We also recommend that you read the service provider’s Terms of Service carefully and familiarize yourself with their renewal rates.

5. Do They Have a Free Trial/Refund Policy?

Using a hosting service can be quite costly, especially if you don’t have a big budget for it. That’s why you will always want to go for a hosting company that offers some form of a free trial period or refund policy to reduce your costs.
Free trials allow you to safely test out different hosting plans and choose the one that fits your website’s needs. You can also opt out when the plan doesn’t cover all your preferences.

Similarly, you always want a hosting service provider with good refund policies should anything go wrong while using the service. You want to go for companies with money-back guarantees and offer prorated refunds after your trial period expires.

6. Have Backups for Your Website

Backups are essential for any online service. Even with the best security features in the world, you will still face website failure, crash, viruses, or hacks at some point, which will take your website down.

Here’s where you need a hosting service with a good backup policy to protect all your data in case something goes wrong with the data and files. Backup copies allow you to revert to your working site in case of an accident.

A good web host provider allows you to restore your full website data with minimal downtime. This will help you avoid significant losses should an accident occur.

Some factors you must consider in this case:

• Do they offer regular full backups?
• Can they create auto backups?
• Can manually backup your website through your control panel
• You can restore your backup files yourself without technical support

7. Quality of the Customer Support

There will be times when you have server issues that you cannot solve yourself. Here’s where you will need a hosting provider with good customer support. Ideally, you will want a web hosting provider with a good and responsive support team that you can reach by either telephone or chat. This way, you can resolve your website issues immediately with minimal to no downtime.

Conclusion

When choosing a web hosting company, you must take your time and consider all the options available to you. Weigh in on the different web hosts and choose the one that meets all your website’s hosting needs. This will save you a lot of time and money down the road.

The factors mentioned above are critical for any website owner looking for the right hosting provider. Consider them carefully.