Running a small or a larger business in today’s digital world requires that you have a strong online presence, therefore choosing the right web hosting provider is a critical decision that can greatly improve your website’s performance, security, and reliability. Terrible loading speeds, improperly managed web servers, and poor security can and will have an impact on how your online store or business performs and affects the overall customer experience. Some essential factors to be considered will be explored in this article with lowest price per CPU cycle.
Every business needs to have a website, as word of mouth can only take your business so far, eventually, you will need to ensure that you have other ways that people will be able to find your business to ensure you remain operational.
What is the difference between shared hosting vs a dedicated server?
The main differentiating factor is resources. Utilizing shared hosting, resources such as processing power, memory, and network bandwidth are shared among all websites hosted on a single server. Even though resources are shared, each hosting account is isolated from one another to prevent unauthorized access. Having dedicated hosting would mean that the whole server is dedicated to one customer therefore they have full access to the server resources.
The main considerations:
When needing to evaluate a web hosting provider, consider three major factors:
- Average uptime,
- Page load time
- Customer support.
Average Uptime:
One important factor is to consider average uptime, which is the average amount of time that your website stays up at a given period. So let’s elaborate on this, this affects how much traffic your website can get. Therefore your website will not be getting as much traffic and traction if visitors aren’t able to visit and or access the site.
Therefore just having one hour of downtime will result in your business already losing a lot of potential sales. This is a big consideration as to why you would want your average uptime to be 100% or at least as close to it as possible. Whether you have an average uptime below 99.90% means you should start looking and considering utilizing a different web hosting provider.
Load Time:
Load time is another major factor to consider, and therefore how long it takes for your page to load. This is similar to uptime, your page load time affects how much traffic and traction your website will get.
Resulting in a lower and slower load time will mean that several visitors may become frustrated and look elsewhere. A recent study by Google has revealed that 53% of mobile site visitors leave if the website takes longer than three seconds to load a page. Therefore it is crucial for this reason that you must ensure that you can provide a load page within the shortest amount of time possible.
Support:
The last major factor to consider is the web hosting provider’s customer support. When customers feel supported and have the option of getting helpful customer support will result in your website problems being dealt with faster and more effectively. Web hosting providers are usually able to offer phone, chat, and or tick-based customer support. However, the one thing that makes a difference is how quickly your customers receive a response from the support team and how knowledgeable the support team is.
Other considerations to take into account:
Different businesses will have different hosting needs and requirements. Therefore the nature of each business or alternative website’s needs will greatly differ, a personal blog thus won’t require or need the same features of an online store. Therefore some factors that can be taken into consideration are:
Free Domain:
Some web hosting providers offer a free domain for a year, however, after that, you will need to start paying for that. Therefore consider these payments and pricing options.
Bandwidth and storage:
Web hosting bandwidth is the amount of data that a website can deliver to its visitors over some time. Therefore the higher the bandwidth the better it is, however, these costs may creep up on you.
Finding the right web hosting provider is an important part of building your website, therefore finding the perfect fit may be hard with so many hosting providers in the market. However, remember to consider the essential factors before moving on to more specific ones. All you need to do is do your due diligence to find the information you need.
