How to Choose the Best Web Hosting Provider

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Regardless of why you’re creating a website, your goal is to have it accessible at all times. The only way to ensure this will happen is to have the best web hosting provider for your needs. There are some things you should know to ensure that you get the best web hosting experience.

Disadvantages of Choosing a Bad Web Hosting Provider

Before choosing a web hosting provider, you must first know what to look out for. There are some things you simply don’t want in your web hosting provider. Otherwise, you may find yourself in some pretty ugly situations. The following are some disadvantages of choosing a bad web hosting provider:

  • When your website is down, you’ll lose traffic. People will start to believe that you’re unreliable. Nobody can reach your site so nobody can see what you’re offering there. This makes it hard to build an audience. This is especially important today because people expect websites to load quickly.
  • Your goal for your website is to attract as much traffic as possible. To do this, you must rank high in the search engines. If your website is down when the search engines are trying to crawl it, that can negatively impact your search engine rankings. You also don’t want your website to load slowly because people won’t stick around waiting to see what you have to offer.
  • Everyday websites get attacked by people who want to steal information, run a scam, or lead to some other type of damage. Although you can’t have a site that’s perfectly secure, when you have a good, reliable host, it’s more difficult to attack your website and if anything does happen, your data is backed up so it isn’t lost.
  • You should look beyond your first year of hosting. There are a lot of companies who will draw in new business by offering great rates and discounts for the first year only to charge a lot more afterwards. You don’t want to find yourself unable to pay for this because it’s a huge hassle to have to move your website to a new host.

Advantages of Choosing the Best Web Hosting Provider

Your website’s success truly depends on how good of a web host you have. This is why you can’t afford to choose just any web host. But, there are some other reasons why it’s so important to make sure you choose a good web hosting provider. The advantages that this will bring to your website include:

  • Your website will have improved load times so it doesn’t come across as slow and amateur. This will also help your visitors feel better about your site and your business. People will be more likely to stay and this will decrease your bounce rates, which is an important factor in helping you rank better in the search engines.
  • You’re less likely to have website downtime. Your website won’t be unavailable when people want to view it. You also won’t suffer in terms of lost customers, trust, or even revenue.
  • A good, secure web hosting company will let you enable HTTPS on your website. This is important because people will know that you’ve taken precautions to safeguard their information from hackers. This is because with HTTPS, any information that’s shared with your website gets encrypted and hidden from the internet.
  • Professional web hosting companies will protect your website by backing up your data. This means that if something were to happen to your website, you could use your web host’s files to quickly and easily restore your website.
  • Good customer service is a must. You want to know that there will be someone there for you if something were to go wrong. This is important because any disruption to your website could have a bad impact on your business.
  • Besides customer service, you’ll want to make sure that good technical support is offered. Check to make sure that they’re backing up your information and data. They shouldn’t only have the know-how to do this, but they should also tell you what tools they are using to do it as well.
  • Having a good website host will impact your search engine rankings. The last thing you want to happen is for your website to be down when the search engines are trying to analyze it. Instead, you want your website to be up and loading fast so that the search engines get a good impression and rank you higher in the search engine results pages.

How to choose a good web hosting provider

Now that you know what to look for and what to avoid when choosing the best web hosting provider for you, there are a few ways to go about it.

First, you’ll want to check out their customer support. Even if you think a company would make a good host, you should send an email to customer support to make sure you can reach them when necessary. Typically, 24/7 support is available, but this doesn’t guarantee that you’ll get an immediate response. This is why it’s important to email them and find out for yourself.

Secondly, you should take a look at the web host’s uptime track record. Keep in mind that it’s nearly impossible to guarantee 100% uptime. So you should look for a host that has at least 95%-99% uptime.

You should also look at the ability to upgrade your website’s hosting. This is important because as you gain more traffic, you’ll want to make sure that your website can deal with it smoothly. For this to happen, you’ll need to ensure that your host is offering you a decent amount of RAM and hard drive space.

Finally, when you’ve found a website host that can offer you all these things, you’ll want to take a look at their pricing. A good web host isn’t going to be cheap but it’ll be well worth the money you spend. Remember, you usually get what you pay for so don’t be afraid to invest a little extra money here.

 

If you need some further guidance, we’ve created a list for you of the top 10 web hosting providers out there. This list ranks web hosting providers for a variety of sizes and needs. Whether you’re a startup founder just starting out, or you run a more established business, you’ll find it helpful.