When you want to make a website for your company, for a hobby, a blog… You want it to be online all the time. And the only way that will happen is when you choose a good web host. If you pick a bad one, then good luck.
Now, when choosing a provider, it’s important to know what to look for. But before we look at what’s important, we’ll discuss the downsides of choosing a bad (and usually cheap) provider.
Disadvantages of having bad web hosting:
Loss of income and audience:
When your site is down and you are running a business, you will lose potential customers. When people find your website down most of the time, they may also think your business is unreliable. When your site is about your hobby, then you’ve made it so that people can visit your site and see what you’re doing. You probably want to build an audience, but that won’t happen when the place they want to visit online isn’t active.
Bad effect on your ranking:
Your goal with a website is usually to attract a lot of people. Therefore, you will want to rank higher in search results. If your site is not active when search engines try to visit it, your ranking will be negatively affected. And slow websites can also hurt your rankings. People don’t like it if they have to wait a long time for their web page to load, especially when they are browsing the web.
Security breaches and attacks:
Websites are attacked every day by people who want to steal information, scam or simply harm. Although it is impossible to have a perfectly secure website, a good and reliable host will be more difficult to attack and will also have a backup of your data. You really don’t want to lose all your data and the trust of your visitors (or customers).
Now that we have covered various disadvantages of a bad host, let’s move on to the next topic, how to choose a good web host.
Choosing a good provider:
Before reading any further, you should first know that there are many different types of hosting. Like VPS, dedicated and managed web hosting.
So the first and most important factor when choosing a good provider is customer support. You may have a good host, but if there’s a problem and they don’t respond, what are you going to do? Most providers offer 24/7 support, but this does not mean that you will get an immediate response. So be sure to do your research.
Second place would be uptime history. As I mentioned before, this is very important. While it would be difficult to have 100% uptime, if the host is between 95% and 99%, it would be good enough for me to choose it.
But then comes the cost, while many providers are cheap. They really aren’t that reliable. Since you generally get what you pay for, it’s best to choose a web host that costs a bit more.
The last factor you would consider when choosing would be upgradeability. When you get more and more traffic, you want your website to be able to handle it smoothly. Having a good amount of RAM and hard drive space can do wonders.