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When launching a new website, most entrepreneurs think about picking a domain name, hiring a web designer, finding images and writing content. What they may not think about is what’s needed behind the scenes to get the site up running, specifically web hosting. Every page of your site is stored in a file, and the web host is the company that stores these files in its online folder system. Picking a host shouldn’t be done hastily, and it shouldn’t be done solely on price. When you send clients to your site, it needs to be up, running and error-free. The cheapest host may not do that for you. To help you make this decision, here are a few things, outside of monthly cost, you should look for when selecting your next web host.
Positive reviews. Search for “find a web hosting company” in any search engine, and you’ll get pages upon pages of results. Don’t just pick the first option. Top rankings in Google, MSN, or Yahoo do not guarantee a reliable company. These rankings only guarantee that a company spent time and/or money on search engine optimization. Before you purchase web hosting, visit sites that review web hosts, such as Top 5 Hosting. This site is specifically for those in the UK looking for a web host. These experts test, rank and review UK only hosting providers, looking at factors like cost, uptime, support, disk space and bandwidth. This is also a good place to start building your short list. From here, find out if any colleagues have used these web hosts and their experience with them.
When browsing through Google, make sure you do not blindly trust positive articles that don’t have enough data. For example, this article on entrepreneur.com recommends HostGator, BlueHost and 1 and 1. The first two are part of EIG Group, and the third was bought by GoDaddy. While the article gives all three great reviews, if you browse through specialized communities of web masters and web developers, you’ll notice reviews of EIG brands are quite bad.
Backup and security. Make sure the host stays up to date with software patches and makes use of firewalls. Check that they back up the sites on their server frequently as well. That way, if you accidentally delete an important file, your site gets infected with a virus or your site gets hacked, it’ll be up and running in no time.
Good customer service. If your website goes down, you’ll want support ASAP. Make sure the host you choose provides that. Before signing up, check to see what types of support services will be available to you. Here are some ways you may be able to connect: telephone, online forums, email, live chat with a customer service rep and pre-written FAQ sections. Don’t just look at variety. Look for web hosting reviews that talk about wait times, too. Being able to reach a host five different ways doesn’t matter if it takes them 24 hours to respond to your question.
Price. Make sure the host offers at least 30 days’ money back guarantee. This way you can test the service, see what other sites are hosted on the same server, weather they are blacklisted, spammed or hacked and so on.
WordPress. WordPress is a very friendly and affordable CMS and a lot of people choose it because there are a lot of developers and a lot of already made themes and plugins that make the creation of a blog easy and cheap task. If you want to create your site with WordPress, here is what you need to know about the hosting: It has to be a Linux hosting that supports PHP 7 and MySQL. It has to offer some WordPress specific features like premium themes, WordPress cacher, instant updates and so on. Price is also a factor here as a lot of companies that claim that are WordPress pros are offering the same service but on a much higher price. If you are not sure which ones are good here you can find a list with the best WordPress hosting companies and pick one of them, they are all big established providers with positive reputation and fair prices.
Those are just a few things to look for when selecting your next web host. Are there other factors small business owners should consider? Write them in the comments below.
