Your company’s website can be a very important showcase to increase your sales or demand for services. However, if you don’t have a good page speed that responds well to your visits, you may even lose customers because of a bad user experience.
One of the main factors to consider when creating your own website is choosing a good web hosting. For me it is a fundamental factor and in this article I will tell you why.
Why is it important to choose a good web hosting?
Having a quality web hosting will allow you to provide good service to your customers with a fast, secure and always online website.
To achieve all of this, you must consider some aspects that I mentioned below that will help you not to make a mistake in your choice.
Server location
It is very important to know where your visits come from, which country you will get the largest number of clients in order to host your website on a nearby server. For example, It is not the same to host your website on a server in Asia when most of your visits come from Latin America as to host your website in a good web hosting in Mexico. Your page will be served much faster in this second option making navigation much easier and faster.
If your visits are spread around the world and you are not sure where to host your website, another option may be to host it on your preferred server but to use a good CDN.
A CDN is a service that has your website content in different data centers distributed around the world. This way, your website will be served to every visitor from the data center closest to your location. So you make sure your website loads as fast as possible.
If you don’t know where to start, Cloudflare offers you a free service and is also very easy to set up.
Hosting with SSD drives
Now a days, it is essential to have a hosting company that offers SSD disks. Most quality companies offer SSD storage but there are still sites that do not. You must check this because with SSD storage your website will load much faster.
To give you an idea, a SSD (solid-state drive, a type of storage device that uses non-volatile memory, such as flash memory instead of magnetic disks like conventional hard drives) is at least twice as fast as a floppy disk, HDD (hard drive disk). This speed makes the operating system faster. This is noticeable not only in programs or games, but also allows to serve more quickly web pages, which is also very important. In addition, they have a longer duration.
The price of this type of disc is higher than the old HDD but as they progress in performance their price is also decreasing more and more.
In my opinion all hosting companies should offer SSD disks. Because, if you look at my own website speed score, which is almost 100%, but due to high regulation images using on the homepage, its taking 4 sec to load.
Backups and anti-hacking measures
It is essential to buy a secure web hosting. To this end, I consider it important that the company regularly back up all of your content. And, if possible, let them allow you to retrieve those copies yourself when necessary.
Also, it’s interesting that your hosting has anti-hacking protection measures to keep your site protected. In this sense, it is best to have a web hosting optimized for the CMS that you are going to use and provides extra protection for your websites. One example is to use Imunify360, a firewall with community immunity with self-learning capability, and it is improving as new threats arise.
Likewise, it is very important for you that the hosting company must tell you how many backups it will makes and whether they are daily or not. Also for how long you store each of them. If you can recover them whenever you want and restore them yourself or have an additional cost in case you need them.
Many people are surprised when they make a mistake with their website and realize that their hosting does not back up. Or that they want to charge you a high amount for restoring it. It is something that all companies should offer, but it is not. For this reason I recommend that you inform yourself before choosing a particular hosting.
Technical support and customer service
As an entrepreneur you are, you have enough reason to worry about the proper functioning of your site. To avoid problems when something fails, it is best to have a better web hosting that offers good support and helps you when you need it. It is something that is not given much importance. But the moment you really need it is when you miss it.
Always notice that the media offers your chosen hosting company, whether it has telephone support, chat, tickets, email etc and whether they are available all day or only on a reduced schedule.
Ability of your hosting plan and hosting features
Finally, I recommend that you look closely at the features of the plan you are going to buy. Also check, how many places you can host within the same plan. There are companies that need to host several websites in one place. If this is your case, look at it.
Equally important is to see the size of your website, if you are going to host many images or heavy content. In this case you may need a plan with plenty of space.
If you expect to have many visitors, see that the company does not limit the number of monthly visits you can have. Or the traffic limitation is enough for you.
Existence of an SLA by the hosting company
A SLA or service level agreement is a document written by the service provider. It explains what is responsible the web hosting company and what will not.
For example, In this SLA, the company guarantees server response times and server availability times. It is also clear in which cases and conditions the company takes care of server downloads.
This SLA also will clarify the conditions and rewards that will be granted to the client in the event of not providing a quality service at a certain time.
Hosting performance: dedicated vs. shared
The difference between having a shared hosting and a dedicated server is very large. A dedicated hosting will always be better, but it will still be more expensive. In addition, you will need to know how to manage it or have someone to manage it for you.
Meanwhile, in a Shared hosting you share the features of your server among several users (which is why it is Cheaper), a dedicated hosting is exclusively for you.
Depending on the type of project you have and especially on your budget, you will need to buy one or other option.
Anyway, thanks to the quality offered by various companies today, you can get hosting plans shared very well set up that “separate” space on the shared server for each of the users. This ensures that what a customer does with their websites does not affect your projects at all. It’s like having little ones dedicated to shared prices.
You can see one of my website loading speed which hosted on dedicated hosting bellow. It has been build on wordPress.
How to get the best hosting at the best price?
To finish this article, I want to give you a recommendation so that you can get a quality web hosting at the best price.
Choosing a good hosting is not just one that has the best features. You must choose one that has the best value for money. Our goal is to get a company that has good performance but at an attractive price for us.
By the way, here is my recommended hosting provider because of their services and speed:
- Cloudway: It is my top recommended hosting provider. Because cloudways will meet all your hosting requirements, from speed to security. It has an reasonable pricing as well.
- Kinsta: If you are planning to build your business site using WordPress, then there is no better alternative of Kinsta, at least from my point of view.
- SiteGround: I also recommend siteground for faster loading website. One of the best optimized server.
- Bluehost: And lastly, if you are in low budget or just need to buy a hosting to start your blog site, then there is no alternative of Bluehost.
If you check, most companies offer juicy promotions when buying your first web hosting plan. This is because they intend to attract new customers with these promotions.
The best thing you can do is make the most of it by buying your plan for two or more years. They usually allow you to pay up to 3 years on your first contract. This way you take advantage of the reduced price for three years and not just over one. Remember that when you renew your hosting plan you must do it at your usual price and not the promotional price.