If you want to create a website for your business, for a hobby, for a blog… you want it to be almost always online. And that is only possible if you choose a good web hosting provider. If you pick a bad one then good luck.
When choosing a provider, it is important to know what to look for. But before we look at the essentials, let’s go into the disadvantages of choosing a bad (and usually cheap) provider.
Cons of Bad Web Hosting:
Loss of sales and audience:
If your website is down and you run a business, you will lose potential customers. If people can’t find your website most of the time, they’re also likely to think your business is unreliable. If your website is about your hobby, then you’ve designed it so that people can visit your website and see what you do. They probably want to build an audience, but that’s not going to happen if the place they want to visit online isn’t available.
Bad effect on your ranking:
Your goal with a website is usually to attract a lot of people. So you want to rank higher in search results. If your website is not available when search engines try to visit it, your ranking will be negatively affected. And slow websites can also hurt your ranking. People don’t like it when they have to wait a long time for your webpage to load, especially when surfing the web.
Security breaches and attacks:
Websites are attacked every day by people looking to steal information, defraud, or just out to cause harm. Although it is impossible to have a perfectly secure website, a good and reliable host is harder to attack and also has a backup of your data. You really don’t want to lose all your data and the trust of your visitors (or customers).
Now that we’ve covered some cons of a bad host, let’s move on to the next topic of how to choose a good web hosting provider.
Choosing a good provider:
Before reading any further, you must first know that there are many different types of hosting. Like VPS, dedicated and managed web hosting.
So, the first and most important factor in choosing a good provider is customer support. You may have a good host, but if there is a problem and they don’t respond, what will you do? Most providers offer 24/7 support, but that doesn’t mean you’ll get an immediate response. So make sure you do your research.
Second would be the uptime track record. As I mentioned before, this is very important. While it would be difficult to have an uptime of 100%, if the host has between 95% and 99% I would find it good enough to select it.
But then comes the cost, while many providers are cheap. They’re not really reliable. Since you usually get what you pay for, it’s better to choose one web hosting provider that costs a little more.
The final factor I would consider when choosing would be the ability to upgrade. As you get more and more traffic, you want your site to be able to handle it smoothly. With a good amount of RAM, hard drive space can do wonders.
Source by Liam Wolfe
