With the fact that the majority of customers are acquired through web searches these days, it’s an absolute necessity for any business to have a sound web presence. In contrast, during the early days of the Internet here was no telling how important and indispensable that presence would become. While the design, usability, and content of a company’s website are all important for success in digital marketing, business owners also need to look long and hard as to where they will choose to host their websites. When it comes to hosting, you really do need to understand that one size does not fit all.
Here at 4GoodHosting, part of what has made us a reputable Canadian web hosting provider is the fact we’re very accountable to our customers in as far as their individual web hosting needs.Going with a web host that’s not an ideal fit for your business can result in a loss in revenue, detrimental effects on your SEO rankings, as well as the possibility of security and malware attacks. And it’s not just you the business that’s put at risk - your customers can be put in vulnerable positions as well, in particular with those same software and malware attacks.
There’s no getting around the fact that the Web is an ever more competitive and dangerous space. As a result, businesses need to be very judicious in choosing web hosting. With that understood, we’re happy to offer you 6 tips here that can help businesses make the most solid choice for their web hosting.
Understand the Entirety of Your Hosting Needs
This may seem overly rudimentary, but business owners in the market for web hosting must first know what makes up the entirety of their online marketing needs. You’ll find that more than a few low-cost web hosting companies cut their operating costs by limiting the technologies they make available to you as a customer.
Before you commit to one, make sure you ask yourself a series of questions
- Do I need special software, such as a CMS?
- What are my current traffic needs (how many visitors do I have to my website in a specific time frame
- Do I need Windows applications?, a Linux one?, an SSD one?
Asking these questions will help you to identify your needs and choose the web hosting company that will work best for you.
An Excellent Uptime Record is a Big Plus
If you’re aiming to take your business onto the world stage and being a global company, a big part of that is being ‘open’ for visitors 24/7 and 365 days a year for prospective customers who could be anywhere around the globe. The internet does not sleep, and your website needs to be accessible at all times. Any hosting provider you’re considering should do everything in their power to ensure maximum uptime.
It’s fairly common these days for web hosting companies to boast a 99.9% uptime. However, the reality is often that that’s not entirely accurate. A good suggestion is to seek out independent reviews of their reliability in order to better help you make your decision.
Good Support Goes a Long Way
Web hosting is like any technical service really. There’s likely to be times when you’ve got get technical support to resolve an issue you have. Accordingly, you’ll be best served by choosing a web host that has a good reputation for both technical support and customer service. Again, many web-hosting services will insist that they offer 24/7 service when in reality their support may be much less thorough or extensive than promised.
For example, should your website become inexplicably inoperative at 3 am on a weekend morning, you will of course want to get in touch with someone who can remedy the situation. In addition, for most of us talking to a real person is vastly preferable. And a speedy resolution is always of the utmost importance when your site is designated for e-commerce as downtime means you are potentially missing out on sales. If customer support can’t be reached until Monday at 8 30 am their time, you may well find yourself boiling over with frustration.
Don’t Choose the Best Price by Default
Letting the cost of web hosting services play too large a part in your decision making process is highly inadvisable. Yes, overhead and operating costs always need to be controlled, but again - with the incredible importance of digital marketing - you really don’t want to skimp on spending for quality, reliable web hosting services. As is true of so many things - with web hosting, you get what you pay for.
If we may suggest, rather than thinking about what you can afford, consider what you cannot afford. Frequent downtimes will definitely be on that list, and we imagine security breaches will be as well. Inexpensive web hosting will almost certainly be shared web hosting. Such an arrangement will work fine if your business does not see any large quantity of visitors to your site everyday.
However, if your website is attracting a large amount of traffic then you may want to look into VPS hosting in Canada. Sure, it will cost more than other hosting services, but it will ensure you have the reliability and server space you need to accommodate surges in visitors and let your site run optimally if it’s particularly dynamic with multimedia and so on. In addition to this, you’re more likely to enjoy superior technical support as well.
Ability to Scale
Your business will grow - or at least we can certainly hope that it will, as that will naturally be your aim. As such, your website should be be able to handle the increased traffic that will come with such growth. You will want - maybe we can even say need - a web hosting company that can grow with your business and adapt along with you as you see more and more traffic incoming to your site as the months pass.
Further, having to switch web hosting providers in response to that growth is going to present its own set of challenges / problems. Instead, ask yourself now if any prospective provider has the means and / or resources to offer you different hosting arrangements as you may (or will - let’s think positively) need them in the future. For example, if you start off with just a WordPress blog on a shared hosting plan, can you graduate to a dedicated hosting arrangement for more processing power, disk storage, and improved security features? Further, are you able to upgrade your service, and if so, how easy is the process? A quality web hosting provider aims to accommodate business clients as their businesses grow and experience greater exposure and thus success within their digital marketing efforts.
Consistent and Reliable Site Backups - So Important
As much as we might wish it wasn’t the case, servers are technical machines and as such there will be system failures. They will go down, and websites will crash. Of course, we work hard to prevent the frequency of that and in fairness it does happen extremely rarely given the efforts of responsible web hosting providers like us and many others.
So no matter what caused the failure, you as the customers will more primarily be interested in knowing your data has been protected and how quickly you can be up and running just as before. You should always ask potential web hosts for their backup policy. Also, find out how regular these backups are, how easy they are to perform and whether it can be performed by the site administrators.
The peace of mind in knowing your website is in the best of hands is really quite enjoyable for any business owner, and again especially so with the fact that so much of your business growth is dependent on the success of your digital marketing campaigns. Your website is a massive part of that campaign of course, so don’t even think of leaving it in a potentially precarious position.
