Tips to Choosing the Best Web Hosting Services for Your Business
Tips to Choosing the Best Web Hosting Services for Your Business
Choosing a web hosting company is a vital phase in the launch of any digital project. With so many different aspects to take into consideration, ranging from security to up-time to support, it’s difficult to sift through the thousands of web hosting companies offering what seems like a similar level of service.
- Evaluate and Understand Your Hosting Needs
First things first, you need to know your requirements as an online company. It is the most important to prepare at least rough estimations of what resources will be required to keep the site running. Starting with daily visitors estimate is a very healthy practice. Without at least a general understanding of how many visitors your project will get, you’ll end up either paying far too much for an unnecessarily large (and expensive) server, or far too little for a server that can’t keep up with the amount of traffic your website or application generates.
- Inspect the Infrastructure
The state and strength of the infrastructure of a website host is incredibly important. The difference between the best and the rest, is the infrastructure that the web host leans upon. We listed a few different questions that brands should pose to potential web hosts concerning their infrastructure.
- How many uplink carriers does the hosting company have at each hosting location?
- What is the total bandwidth that the company has at each hosting location? This will help to determine peak time performance.
- What is their network topology? Here, we’re looking for redundancy, and preferably with diverse carriers, to ensure up-time.
- How many peers does the hosting company have? More peers usually means lower IP transit cost, better user experience and increased network resiliency.
- Does the company offer dedicated connections/lines to provide more reliability and security? This one isn’t a must, but it’s a bonus.
- Factor in Scalability
Scalability is another key dimension to consider, as your requirements may change. When that change occurs, you don’t want to be forced into switching your web host. Instead, it’s wise to choose a hosting company that can accommodate your growth. It is important to have the partner which is flexible enough to support your growth by handling increasing “hunger” for resources of your infrastructure.
- Consider Specialist Hosting Companies
Some hosting companies are welcoming to businesses of all forms, but some have niched down, specializing in working with brands using certain technologies or working within certain industries. Brands should consider the business focus of the host to see if that aligns with their business and technology. Determine if the host is focused on your particular size of business or the technologies you use to support your website.
It’s also wise to remember that choosing a web hosting company doesn’t have to be impulsive or based purely on a sales pitch. In some cases, the company will allow you to test their service — which is definitely an option you should consider before taking the plunge.
