The major reason to choose a reliable web host is to minimise the chances of downtime that could lead to the loss of revenue as a result of declined sales of your products or services. When a website is offline as a result of web hosting problems or maintenance, online users are unable to visit your website to learn of or purchase the services and products offered.
When this happens, your potential clients look for alternatives – which will result in the loss of income and sales for your company. In addition, frequent downtime can negatively impact the reputation of your business. Hiring the services of a reliable web hosting provider will guarantee that your website is always online and functional to your customers, thereby minimising the loss of revenue that your business absolutely cannot afford.
Why You Need Reliable Web Hosting
Even though it is physically possible to host a website on your own server — if you have the technical skills. But doing so would amount to signing yourself up for a lot of work. Self-hosting a website requires expensive servers that need a constant supply of power supply, would require regular hardware maintenance, backups in case of downtime and a static IP address.
If you are new to the world of web hosting and lack the prerequisite technical skills needed to set up and maintain a server, it is strongly advised that you hire a web host service – albeit a reliable web host.
What To Look Out For In A Web Hosting Provider
- Scalability Option
When selecting a web hosting provider, you would want one that can grow with you. The goal of your website is not to stay the same size but to grow, and this usually means more traffic. As time progresses, your website requirements from your web host will evolve. For example, if a basic shared hosting plan was what you started with, then you might have to upgrade to managed WordPress hosting, VPS servers or dedicated hosting.
When choosing a web host, ensure that their packages are scalable and that you can easily switch to a different hosting plan at any time. They should also offer a great exit strategy for switching out hosting providers. It is not easy to find a host that you can use for a long time
- High Uptime And Reliability
Server uptime is basically how frequently your website is available online. The industry standard is 99.9%, which is what most top-quality hosts offer. This only allows for necessary server updates that could temporarily cause your websites to be off-line. In fact, some hosting providers have a “money back” policy for any downtime that happens during their uptime guarantee.
Before you choose a web host, it is smart to read their terms of service regarding uptime. After all, what’s the point of building a great website if it can go offline at any point, especially at very important moments.
- Pricing
Change in hosting prices is commonplace in the web hosting industry. Unless you are buying a hosting plan for a couple of years (this is not a good practice), then you would definitely encounter fluctuating price from a provider. Before selecting a hosting company, make sure that they have clear pricing terms so you are pre-warned about a price increase or higher renewal fees, for instance,
- Bandwidth
The size of bandwidth available with a web hosting plan simply refers to the number of web page views and traffic that your website is allowed to handle monthly. A lot of web hosting firms provide ‘unlimited bandwidth.’ But there is a possibility that your access to bandwidth resources will be cut-off if your website suddenly experiences a spike in traffic, such as when a blog post goes viral or your Black Friday sale ad produces great results.
Even with a basic shared hosting service that promises unlimited bandwidth, you should have it at the forefront that ‘unlimited’ hosting probably won’t be unlimited. A website on most shared hosting services will be allowed to manage about 30,000 end-users a month on average. If this cap is exceeded, site load time will increase and site performance decrease. If you are at this level then chances are you can afford a better or upgraded plan.
- Storage
Storage is another thing to consider when selecting a web hosting provider. The amount of storage you get with your web hosting plan will depend on the web host. However, unless you are storing a lot of media files, data or videos, you can work with the minimum storage.
- Great Customer Support
The quality of customer support is a feature of a web hosting plan that you may not really dwell on – until it becomes too late. Picture this – your websites suddenly goes offline, you try everything but you can’t get it online. You try to contact the support team of your web hosting providers but get no response and you have a big sale that needs to go live the following day, leaving you in a panicked state. What we just described would be an absolute nightmare.
Because of this reason, you would want to try out customer support of a web host before making the final purchase decision. Test out all customer support channel and ensure that it works for you. For instance, some providers might offer support via email through ticketing and others might include phone support or live chat feature.
Pro tip: Go with a web host with multiple functional support channels. Bluehost, Internet UK, 1 & 1 IONOS and https://www.domains4less.co.nz/ and just a few that come well recommended.
- Website Management Tools
The first time you purchase hosting, you would probably only require one website. However, as your website’s traffic grows, the need to create subdomains of your current domain or register more domains will arise.
The web host you choose should offer tools like cPanel that make domain management easy. In addition, when choosing a web hosting provider, look for one that allows you to host multiple domains on a single account as some web hosts will only allow you to host one domain based on the hosting package.
Pro tip: Always select a hosting service plan that offers multiple or unlimited domain hosting.