Picking the best website hosting for your needs

Behind every user-friendly, kick-ass website with a stunning web design is a great hosting service, so it’s worth taking the time to find the best suited hosting platform for you. Many people don’t understand web hosting because it’s something that generally operates in the background and can seem daunting to non tech-savvy users, but in reality it is an essential tool that can have a huge impact on your online presence.

The first step to picking the perfect hosting provider is to clearly understand what your current and future needs are. Will your website get tens of thousands visitors every day and require a lot of bandwidth or will it be fairly small with only a limited amount of traffic each month? With this in mind, most web-hosting providers have three types of packages to choose from:

Shared Hosting

Shared hosting is when your website shares the same hosting environment with multiple other websites. These plans tend to be the most popular as they are the cheapest, but can often cause your website to be slightly slower and viruses on one site could possibly affect other websites on the shared server.

Dedicated servers

Dedicated servers allow you to have the entire web server for your own use. As you are the only one using the server, you’ll have better protection against viruses, more bandwidth to use and faster performance is pretty much guaranteed.

VPS / Cloud Servers

Virtual Private Servers (VPS) or Cloud Servers don’t limit you to a physical server, but instead enable you to easily scale any of the resources as and when you need them. You aren’t restricted in anyway and have full access to manage and set up the server exactly how you need it.

Avoid downtime

Avoiding downtime is a must for any website owner, especially if you run an online store. If your website is unreachable, your customers will not be able to make purchases and they will lose trust in your brand. There will always be times servers crash or run into problems, so pick a host that rarely has these problems and has a good track record in fixing issues promptly.

What happens if your website gets hacked?

Whichever hosting provider you use, keep in mind you’re trusting them with a lot of sensitive information about yourself and most importantly your customers, which could be vulnerable to hackers. Make sure the hosting company you choose has good security and offers regular backups in case your website gets infected with a virus and you need to restore your files.

It is also recommended to use an SSL certificate, which encrypts all of the data stored on your website. Some hosting providers now offer a free standard SSL certificate to start you off, but there are multiple different paid certificates you can choose from.

Support

Choosing a hosting company with good support is vital, even if you’re a professional web developer. There will be times when you come across issues with your website or hosting environment and you don’t want to be waiting days for a reply to your urgent support tickets to be answered with minimal help.

Speed

Lets face it, if you browse a website that takes forever to load each page you visit, would you stay? No, so why would your users? If your website is constantly slow and experience a lot of downtime, your bounce rate will increase and you’ll also find your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) will be negatively affected. Finding a fast and reliable hosting provider in an absolute must.

5 popular hosting companies:

Conclusion

We highly recommend taking all of these factors into account before choosing a hosting provider. From avoiding downtime and the general speed of your website, to security and support can all have a huge impact on how successful your website is.

If you need help setting up your hosting environment or looking to move providers and need help moving your website, why not contact us today!