Choosing Hosting Provider is Something you Must Pay Attention to
In the ever-changing web world, a hosting provider is also choosing something that you must continuously pay attention to, especially if you have a growing website.
Hosting affects the speed of your website, the searchability of your website by search engines, the user-friendliness for visitors. In short, hosting is an essential part of your website. But not all hosting services can give you the quality you expect.
Cheap is often expensive
Of course it is attractive to have your website online for as little money as possible: 10 dollars per year for a domain name and 1 dollar per month for your hosting. Nice and cheap and you think you have arranged it for good.
Until there is a problem with your site. Then the downside of cheap hosting appears to be that they can’t be reached by telephone, for example, because they have to cut costs with such low rates.
Your website becomes unreachable and you miss customers. Your web developer dedicates all the hours he / she has to spend on solving your website problem.
In short, your hosting is cheap, but you’re paying extra in hidden costs.
Choose a professional 'dedicated' provider
Choose a company that has hosting as 'core business'. Our best example is Cloudflare. Primarily being a CDN service provider they also offer web hosting and domain names. While being absolute experts in website protection, they don’t actually have dedicated experts to solve your website hosting problems. If the problem occurs with your website, you have two options. Either to solve the problem on your own, or reach out to provider’s customer support. With cloudflare you’ll find that reaching out to support will bring you to the first option - solve it on your own.
Our experiences with small IT companies or IT self-employed people who rent computer space from a professional hosting provider are also poor. Hosting is not their core business and they usually do not have the right answer to your question. Or at least it will cost you more time and energy than if you were with a professional provider.
Make sure your provider has 24/7 customer support
Nothing is more annoying than when your website is suddenly offline and you can’t reach your provider to fix it. Your business might go offline during the night. If all your customers are sleeping, well that’s not a big loss. But if your website operates globally, some in the other part of the globe is very well awake and unable to access your website.
In addition, website crawlers don’t sleep at night. For example, Google bot works relentlessly to find the best and most relevant websites. This bot has a lot of variables that it uses for indexing and ranking purposes. If the Google bot notices that your website is down, it can’t vouch for it and rank it well. If your website isn’t ranking on Google, you’re losing on one of the acquisition channels!
Cheap hosting usually means a slow website
If you want a website that loads quickly, so that your visitors are well served (and so Google also sees that you are doing well and rewards it with better search results) then the reality is that you usually have to choose a more expensive hosting package. With cheap plans, your server is usually shared with many other website owners. In other words, ceiling above your head is not that far away. Scaling your website with cheap plans isn’t a solution.
Tailor the type of hosting to your needs for your website
Is your website actually a static digital folder that you occasionally refer to, then cheap hosting is a great solution. Is your website an active sales channel for your services or products, then you want hosting that fits and you are often a little more expensive and good service from the provider is essential. Your web builder can do a lot for your website, but ultimately it also depends on good hosting to make the website work optimally.
Finishing words
Choose your hosting in consultation with your web developer. Or do an extensive research on your own. Especially if your website becomes more extensive, good search results are important and good speed of your website is essential.
