The Best Features to Look for When Choosing Your Web Hosting Service

When it comes to choosing a web-hosting site, it can be a bit overwhelming firstly because there are so many options, and secondly the jargon can be a bit confusing if you’re not a serious web developer. Just like in any industry there are fantastic web hosting services and poor web hosting services, with lots in between. To make sure you end up with the best for you, here are some of the features you should be looking out for when it comes to choosing your web hosting service.

What is your web hosting for?

Are you writing a blog, selling or informing? It’s important to have a clear understanding of what you need from your host site before you choose as not all are modelled for business. If this is just a personal thing that you’re pursuing, you’ll be fine on a free hosting site whereas if you are running a company you should look for paid hosting options that support businesses.

However, if you’re a smaller business there is also the option for shared hosting and domain hosting. Shared hosting is where you share the server you’re using with multiple users. This is fine because it’s likely you won’t need huge amounts of storage, but if you choose a really popular site it’s likely that the hard drives are crowded and this could potentially also mean that they’re slow.

Domain hosting is very similar to web hosting except it means your domain is included. Every website in its physical form needs a web host site, but the www.yournamehere.com needs a domain host. You are free to host your domain anywhere, you can easily then transfer the website onto that address.

What web hosting can you afford?

Understandably, paid for hosting sites are going to have advantages over the free sites but can you afford the package? Usually, users are tempted into 12-month plans that are marketing at reduced rates but after 12 months you will have to pay the full price, consider whether you can afford this before signing up. Things to look for (if you’re paying) are web-hosting services that offer unlimited domains, 24/7 support, and unlimited web space and email. There are a few companies out there that do this well, such as HostGator or UK2. Because they’re working from some of the most economical data centers in the country, UK2 promises super speeds on efficient servers.

How skilled are you with websites and web hosting?

The most widely used content management system (CMS) is WordPress hosting because it’s one of the easiest to use and with so many people using it, there’s a lot of help and guidance out there on the internet. If you’re scared of designing your own website, it’s definitely safer going through WordPress just because it means you can choose from hundreds of premium templates that you can easily make your own. If you’re a business, a dedicated server is the most popular option because it means you essentially own the space and it’s down to you to keep it up and running.

A dedicated server also allows you to generate revenue, have certain times of year with huge amounts of traffic such as sales periods and your business needs all the extra hosting features such as server software and high server specifications.

Lifewire says the best thing about dedicated hosting is that ‘your business need not anymore go through the risk of crashing down and getting vastly slowed down. Moreover, the server response time is also excellent, thus ensuring that your site visitors need not wait for a long time during the navigation.’ With page-loading times closely linked to high bounce rates, this is extremely important when it comes to an ecommerce site.