How Your Choice of Hosting Company can Make or Break an Online Business

On average, web hosting providers are down for over 35 hours every year. That means that your site could be down for well over a day and you might never know it. Having the right hosting company can literally mean the difference between making a sale and losing it. If your clients aren’t able to access your site when they need to, then there’s always a risk that they might end up landing on one of your competitor’s pages instead.

As a result, you’ll want to look for a hosting company that offers near constant levels of uptime. Naturally, nobody can remain connected to the Internet all around the clock. There’s always the threat of power outages and networking failures that could take even the most dedicated system offline. That being said, some services claim that they’re up nearly 99.9 percent of the time. The trick is to find the ones that truly are.

Finding a Hosting Service that can Make Your Company’s Site

Host Advice held a sort of competition where they solicited Cloudways reviews as well as reviews of other services. They found that uptime was, naturally, the biggest concern of individual business owners. It was hard for consumers to know whether or not a service was going to be able to meet its uptime claims.

As a result, many potential hosting clients first checked out the level of customer support offered by each individual service they were interested in. It stands to reason that a company with excellent levels of customer support would also offer very good uptime statistics.

Quite a few first-time web hosting customers who responded to the survey were also concerned that they might end up needing help deploying their sites along the way. Hosting providers with a high level of customer service proved quite attractive to these clients, since they felt they could get the help they needed.

If you’ve never purchased hosting services in the past, then you’re going to want to look for these qualities as well. You might not be able to get your site out fast enough to get a leg up on the competition if you don’t have the support to back up your service plan. That being said, this might not be a major concern of more experienced buyers.

Regardless of what market sector you fall into, however, you’re going to want to opt to do business with a hosting firm that actually provides all of the services your company needs to deploy the kind of site designed for it. You’ll also want some security detail to prevent crackers from seizing control of your newly minted online address.

Checking Your Hosting Provider’s Service List

There’s more to site hosting than simply providing a place for your to upload your site’s resources and assets. Some services offer nothing more than a remote file system, which might not actually load web content that’s generated programmatically. Others offer you everything from TFTP connections to Usenet access.

If nothing else, then you’ll probably at least want support for dynamic web resources. React.js and other popular web frameworks rely on support for this feature.

Those who might not have any site content at all as of yet may consider investing in a service that provides you with a collection of tools you can rely on to build your site. Other firms with more experienced IT departments might think of this as overkill. In an extreme scenario, you may end up paying for more than you need.

One thing you will want, however, is some kind of backup support.

Hosting Companies Must Back Client Data Up

Imagine that something were to happen to the remote cloud server you work with and your site was suddenly wiped out. This is sure to cause a very serious service disruption to say the very least.

Opt for a service that automatically backs your materials up. While you’re at it, you might look for something that offers hardware backed by multiple cores and multiple fail-safes so you can be sure your data is always in good hands.

In general, hosting services spell out their backup and performance policies in at least some level of detail. They might provide a schedule for backups and state how often they make physical copies of their customers’ information.

See if you can find an organization that makes copies several times a week. This doesn’t sound like a lot, but it’s much better than going with a service that claims to make backups more than once a day but doesn’t really make them at all. Unfortunately, some companies have been caught doing just that in the past.

Picking the wrong hosting service can cause serious problems and might even be a costly thing to do, so take a few moments to do a bit more research now. It can save quite a bit of time and money in the future. You might even be able to find something that helps you attract customers and grow your online brand.