5 Key Things to Look For in a Hosting Service
How long are you willing to let a website load before you leave? One second? Five seconds?
The same goes for your customers.
Choosing the best website hosting service is an incredibly important part of any business and one that can sometimes be taken for granted. You’re doing yourself, your company, and your customers a great disservice by choosing a service just by picking at random based on a single Google search.
Learn more about what to look for in a web hosting service below.
1. Guaranteed Uptime on Dedicated Servers
One of the most important things you want to look for in a hosting service is guaranteed uptime via dedicated servers. This means that the company leases or owns its own server and isn’t just buying space on one with multiple parties.
The hosting service should also be able to guarantee 99% uptime. If they can’t prove it or they guarantee anything less than that, this is not the service you want to use. If your site down causing you to miss out on even one customer, you’ve just wasted your money.
2. Hosting Service Customer Service Availability
When something goes wrong and there’s an emergency, how can you contact customer service? Are they only available via phone from the hours of 1:00 to 3:00 PM EST? Or are they available 24/7 through a multitude of contact options?
At a minimum, customer service should be available via email and chat. They may use a chatbot to answer frequently asked questions or to triage issues to the correct customer service team. However, you don’t want to have to jump through hoops to talk to an actual human to resolve your issues or answer your questions.
3. Fast Website Response
If your website is slow as molasses in the winter, you’re wasting your money. When researching your future hosting service, make sure that they list their average response speeds.
Keep in mind that website speed is a factor when it comes to SEO, and a slow server can hinder your pages from ranking well on Google and other search engines. A slow site will also turn away prospective customers, as no one wants to wait for a site to load like it’s still 2003!
4. User Reviews
Never underestimate the power of user reviews! Of course, you’ll want to take them with a grain of salt, as people who have bad experiences are most likely to leave a negative review of any product or service. However, you should be on the lookout for recurring trends in these reviews.
Are most of the complaints about customer service not responding quickly or not being helpful? Are many folks complaining that their website is often down and speeds aren’t as advertised? Make note of these things!
5. Price
No matter how great a hosting service may be, if their prices are way out of your budget, it won’t matter. Before you start researching providers, decide on your budget and stick with it.
Of course, there should be a little bit of wiggle room if a company really hits it out of the park, but that will likely be rare.
Put These Tips to Use
Once you understand the basics of choosing a hosting service, you’re ready to sign on the (virtual) dotted line! Go forth and create your website empire! And for more info on the tech world and building a business, check out the rest of our site.
