What To Look For In A Web Host

It can be quite astonishing just how rapidly business has moved in the last couple of decades. It wasn’t that long ago when all you needed to do to be a successful owner was to give it a name, sign a few ownership forms and start trading. These days, however, the market is so complex that you need to have every ‘i’ dotted and every ‘t’ crossed to put yourself in a successful position. That means having a strong brand and an invested audience before your company has even launched. One key factor that enables you to do this from the very start is building a website. Any business not online these days is a business doomed to fail, and your website should be one of the first things you put time and money into. It is your online portal where you can shout about everything your company is and does – somewhere prospective clients can come to get a flavor of what you’re all about. Your website should be professional from its very first launch day and should function to meet all your audience’s needs. That is why you need to make sure that your site is operating on a suitable server for maximum performance. This means choosing the right web host for you; but with so many around, how do you know which one is giving you the best deal? Here are a few things to look out for when it comes to picking your host, so you can get your perfect website up and running in minutes.

Decide whether you need shared or dedicated hosting. This is something that a lot of web novices find very confusing – which is totally understandable, seeing as it’s quite a complex notion to grasp. In layman’s terms, shared hosting essentially means that you are capped as to what you can do your website due to sharing the server with others.  Dedicated hosting means that you are the only site on that entire server. For most sites, shared hosting works just fine, but if you are uploading huge files like video to your website, you may want to consider dedicated instead.

E-commerce. If your entire business is sales-based – for example, if you manufacture products and sell them – your site will absolutely need an ecommerce feature. The online shopping market is booming, and your customers will need a sleek, easy to use purchase portal so they can get hold of your products. So, always check that the host you use supports e-commerce features.

Always have backup. As much as it doesn’t bear thinking about, sometimes, the worst can happen, and a site gets hacked. This can be due to fault with the main server, or perhaps some malware infiltrated your site and changed your index.php. Whatever the cause is, your host should be able to perform regular backups to keep your data safe, but again, always check that this is included with your service before you commit to a contract.