HOW TO CHOOSE THE RIGHT HOSTING SERVICE
Are you looking for a hosting service and you don’t know what to choose?
In today’s world, if you want to stay competitive on the market you need a great, available and fast website. Internet is the center of everybody’s life and the world of work is not an exception: if you haven’t a strong web presence you are actually invisible to the eyes of customers and vendors. So, if you are en entrepreneur or have a startup, it’s crucial for you to invest in your website, but often this is limited to overpay the graphics, and then save money on the hosting service, which will actually host your web domain.
That’s a common and serious mistake, because a poor hosting solution can compromise a lot the quality of your web service, making it slow and difficult to manage, due to the bandwidth’s saturation or the low maintenance of server. It’s like having a Ferrari without gasoline, easy on the eyes but of little use, so parked there and forgotten. In addition to that, we can say that the choice of the hosting service is made even harder because of the huge number of offers found on internet, which promise unlimited bandwidth for peanuts and are not serious. These kinds of provider just want to take on new clients and increase their business, by neglecting the quality of service and also the needs of users. How figure this out? How to choose the next “house” for your website? In other words, how to ensure to your supercar a full tank of gas to make it whiz at the right speed?
The right hosting solution for you
Let’s start by saying something very important: it doesn’t exist the best hosting service in absolute terms. The right hosting solution for your website is what suit better your requirements, which are surely different from the needs of other businesses. Therefore, you need to focus especially on the particular features of the service requested, leaving aside proposals of other type. So, if your aim is to create a website for fun, for example a blog about your life or in which you can share thoughts or cooking receipts, probably will not need a dedicated bandwidth and can be satisfied with a cheap service which ensure you just the space needed to stay online. Much depend also on the weight, number of pages and audiovisual resources of your website. Instead, if you have professional purposes and you are looking for new customers, need to choose a powerful service which allows you to make your website a real killing machine. Think about what would happen if while a customer is browsing your site, it takes too much to load or get some error messages from some link or banner. That customer would leave your site to browse your competitors with more available websites. So, be careful about “unmissable offers”: some hosting services are sold for nothing and promise unlimited resources, but you can be sure that this way clients will be hosted on server not powerful enough to manage a discreet web traffic. Slowdowns and outages will be a daily occurance and money saved will be lost in terms of missed customers. Save more time on the search for the right hosting service for your needs and choose a professional solution: by paying something more you will be certain to get the proper space and features to grow your web business.
Types of hosting: dedicated or shared services
Discarded “false friends” and focused on quality services, now it’s the moment to make other assessments in order to reach this choice: which type of hosting is right for my business? There are many variables to keep in mind. First of all, you need to decide if you want a shared hosting or a dedicated server for your website:
- shared hosting is the cheapest solution available, but you’ll have to share space and bandwidth with thousands of users. It entails all the risks of slowdown and downtimes we mentioned above, so it is a good option only if you haven’t particular business needs.
- hosting on dedicated server is more professional and allows your site to have its own space and to take full advantage of server’s computing power: your website will be faster and more reliable, with a superior price you will get better performance which will be surely payed back with increased revenues
- the last option is the hosting on virtual server: it is a middle ground between the first options, server is shared with other users but is not a physical space so you can manage it autonomously like it’s only yours. You can also add more power to it and take full advantage of the bandwidth. Also, virtual server is more protected against cyber-attacks and is the safest solution if your website needs to manage money or sensitive data.
Features of good hosting: bandwidth, scalability and technical support
Which are the hosting features to compare before taking the final decision?
Basically, you can focus on three parameters essential for a good hosting: bandwidth, scalability and technical support. The bandwidth is the simplest feature but also the most important one: it’s the traffic capacity you can use on that server (10 GB, 15 GB, unlimited…). Pay attention to whose offer unlimited traffic because it’s not really like that, usually they are linked to other characteristics with have limitations, and the high-number of users will slowdown your site anyway. May be that at the beginning you need some space and then, after months or years, it was no longer enough, because your business has grown in terms of revenues and advertising campaigns.
You need to consider the scalability: it means that you can make an upgrade of the virtual resources of your website without calling the technical assistance or moving on other servers. It is vitally important also the technical support: even with the best hosting solution, sooner or later you will run into some issues and fix them rapidly and easily must be your priority. Some providers are accessible only by phone and sometimes just in English, other has H24 technical support which would be very useful and efficient. Usually, is good to contact the technical support of the hosting provider you want to choose and ask them all your pre-sales questions to eliminate any doubt about the quality of service offered. Another good practice is asking to who has already tried the hosting service: look for reviews and real opinions in forum of the field (better avoid opinion sites because the most are good reviews), they will give you additional information about benefits and limits of the offer.
The choice of the proper hosting service can make the difference and be a determining factor for your website. Take your time and consider all the proposals, only this way your website will get the maximum performances and results.
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