What Makes A Good Web Hosting Provider
Every decision is an important foundation that ensures the success of your business. The website of your business is part of the foundation. A website can do wonders for businesses especially now with the enormous rise of the eCommerce market. So, it is easy to say that choosing a web hosting service for your website is a big decision. Carelessly choosing a web hosting provider to host and obtain your website can negatively reflect your business and cost you unnecessary expenses. When evaluating a web hosting provider there are 5 key factors you should consider: uptime, loading speed, bandwidth and storage space, security, and customer support. These key characteristics will help you choose the right web hosting service for your website.
Reliability
The first factor to look for when looking for a web hosting provider is the average uptime. Average uptime is the time your website will stay up within a given period. Staying online is very important for your website because it can affect the amount of traffic on your site. The industry standard uptime today is 99.59%, which means the average website downtime is 3 hours per month. Anything below an uptime of 99.90% should not be acceptable. A decent web host provider should provide you with an uptime of at least 99.94%. Especially because there are web host providers on the market such as Verpex that offer a 99.99% uptime guarantee or higher. If you want to track the average uptime of a provider, you can use various network monitoring tools where you can look at their uptime and downtime scores and make sure you are choosing a stable web hosting.
Speed
Loading time is important for any type of website. The speed of your website affects the user’s experience on your site. The slow loading speed can lead to higher bounce rates and lower conversion rates. People today will not wait for a website to load for more than a couple of seconds mainly because there are plenty of other competing websites with faster loading times. The average loading speed on the market is 10.4 seconds on a desktop and 27.4 seconds on a phone. Anything below this will impact your website’s performance. When looking for a web host use tools like page speed insights to check the web host’s loading time statistics, speed, and other website performance metrics that will determine your website performance.
Bandwidth And Storage
The term bandwidth means calculating the rate of traffic and data allowed to flow between the users and your website. Bandwidth can be determined by measuring the maximum data that can be transferred in a given time. Higher-level bandwidth means faster website performance. However, the more restricted bandwidth the longer it will take to transmit the data affecting the website’s speed, network, and connectivity. To determine the amount of bandwidth that you need, estimate the average page size of your site in kilobytes, multiply it by the monthly average number of visitors, and then multiply the result by the average number of page views per visitor. When it comes to bandwidth it is always a good idea to buy up a size for extra room in case of unexpected traffic spikes. So look for web hosting providers that offer unlimited bandwidth or at least a higher amount just in case. The same concept goes for storage, the more storage you get, the better. Storage means the total amount of disk space that your entire website will take up. This includes your website’s size with all text, images, and multimedia files. An average website with text and images needs about 3-5 GB. You can calculate how much storage you need simply by selecting the file it is saved in and checking the file properties. Most websites online are around or below 1 GB but multimedia content like video and audio content can increase that number.
Security
When looking for a web hosting provider always make sure it has great security. Great security protects not only your website’s data but also your customers’ data. Low-level security hosting will not prevent hackers and cybercriminals from accessing your website’s sensitive information. To avoid this from happening, look for web hosting providers that provide additional security features like security monitoring, DDoS protection, LetsEncrypt SSL, RAID, secure data centers, etc. This will help you keep your website safe.
Support
Customer support is the last major factor to consider when you are on the hunt for a web hosting provider. Customer support deals with your website problems fast and efficiently to make sure your website functions as smoothly as possible. Good customer support offers a 24/7 support team via phone, email, live chat, FAQ pages, and chatbots. When it comes to customer support the most important thing is the response time and how knowledgeable is the support team. To see the quality of the web hosting support you can research online reviews by current or former users.
There are numerous other considerations when looking for a web hosting company. Different types of websites have different types of hosting needs. Factors like pricing, additional functionalities, backups, transfer, and domain can also be very important when making a decision. So even though finding the right one for your website can look difficult with so many hosting providers available. The most important thing to remember is to look for the essential factors first and then move on to the more specific ones. This will take a little bit of time and a little bit of online digging, but the right choice will save you a lot of unnecessary hustle in the future.
