It can be downright frustrating to choose a hosting platform, especially for the small business owners, beginners, or even aspiring bloggers. And this has always been the question that has been asked several times – how do I choose a web hosting provider?
If you make a good bet and choose the right platform, you will have saved yourself the hassle. You will have a reliable hosting provider that gives you the best results in terms of speed, excellent customer support, among other services.
And the biggest mistake you can ever make is choosing a hosting provider without doing careful research. Besides, choosing a wrong hosting platform will always make you spend more – jumping into one hosting provider into another.
In this post, we will be walking you through how you can choose the right hosting provider with ease. You don’t have to go through the whole hassle when we are there for you. Let’s dive in.
How to Choose the Right Web Hosting Provider
1. Have your top priorities
Now, you should make sure that you have a list of priorities before you can start hunting for the right hosting platform. This will save you from picking up hosting platforms that do not match your preferences.
The best way to do this is to describe what you want to do with your website. Do you want to make sales from it, or do you want to blog? Maybe you want to create video content – that’s up to you. Just ensure that you know your priorities well.
There are a couple of web hosting providers that will offer you specific tools and infrastructure, depending on your needs. This is because these hosting providers are much aware that different people have different preferences.
2. Consider your options
Now, you need to ask yourself whether or not you’ll be building the site on your own, or you are looking for website builders like Wix or Squarespace. Also, ask yourself whether you are comfortable if the above services are bundled together to save you time – web host and web building.
If you didn’t know: Different website builders today offer hosting services. Now, when you sign up for hosting, you can also build your website, or rather, when you purchase a website builder service, you will get hosting as part of the plan. There are a couple of website builders, which include Weebly, Wix, Squarespace, Shopify, among others.
And finally, you need to understand that website hosting is different from a website builder. You can get a web hosting plan that does not contain website building. So for this, you will build a custom website using CMSs such as WordPress. And the best of all is that you can use WordPress to make your site go live and link it to your host.
3. Do some research
This is one of the mistakes we mentioned earlier – choosing a web hosting provider without doing research. This is dangerous and could sometimes make it more burdening than you ever thought. Imagine a site that always goes down all the time? How many customers do you lose?
And the best of all is that most hosting platforms try as much as they can to simplify things for you by listing some of their features on the main page. Even more, most of them go ahead to give you their pricing, so you can choose which plan fits within your budget.
However, you will have to dig deep if you want to know their disadvantages. This you can understand from hosting reviews. At least you’ll get an idea of what some of the hosting providers are.
Check what customers say about their customer support, their renewal plans, their migration ease, and so on.
4. Compare key factors
Lastly, there are a couple of critical factors you need to check out in a web host provider. Below are some of those critical factors that you need to pay attention to before you can decide to go with a specific web hosting provider:
- SSL certificates — For chrissake, if you will be running an e-commerce site, then you need an SSL certificate more than anyone else. Today, Google warns every user who visits a site if the site has no SSL certificate – the HTTP website. That said, make sure that you have a site URL of https.
- Backups — Can you imagine losing everything that took you years to build on your website. It won’t be fair, and that’s why you need a backup. Some web hosting providers do offer this feature, while some don’t. Please know your priorities and choose wisely.
- Email — As a website owner, you will need professional email addresses to contact your customers or clients. There are a couple of hosting providers that offer free professional emails when you sign up. Be sure to check that.
- Bandwidth and storage capacity — This is a caution – if you have a website that receives a tremendous amount of traffic, then you will need a hosting provider that offers unlimited storage capacity and bandwidth. So, if this is one of your priorities, please go with hosting providers that offer unlimited bandwidth and storage capacity.
- Quality of customer support — Even when you think you might know everything, at one point, you will still need the support of your hosting provider. This is where things go different for most hosting platforms. Their support system is unresponsive and may take hours or even days before you get a reply. Be sure that the hosting provider you are choosing has valid customer support.
If you end up with a shortlist of two similar web hosting providers you can simply check their head-to-head comparison to see which one of them is actually better.
Wrap Up
From this guide, you can see that there are a lot of factors you need to put into consideration before you can choose the right hosting provider.
Use the above tips for reference and make sure that you pay attention to detail for your top priorities. Also, it would help if you took your time while carrying out research.
Don’t be swayed by excellent customer reviews. Also, consider giving a closer look at some of the poor feedback left by unsatisfied customers.
Doing this will save you time and money. Firstly, you will not have to sign up with a wrong hosting provider only to start hoping into one hosting provider to another.
Doing research well helps you not to come around some of the worst web hosting providers. The worst of all is that you could end up spending more than you expected.