Many hosting providers out there will promise to give you best services and pricing. However, not all keep up the promise. You have to be wise and choose the best hosting provider for your business. A bad hosting provider can be harmful to your business, will have negative effects on your rankings, money, and resources will go in vain and it will affect your business in a long run. It is one of the crucial decisions because the future of your website depends on it.

Before selecting a hosting provider, it is important that you know and understand the different types of web hosting. There are mainly three types of hosting viz. Shared hosting, VPS hosting & Dedicated hosting. Shared hosting is the cheapest, whereas VPS and Dedicated hosting are little expensive. Depending on the needs of your website, select the right web hosting.

One would usually go with a hosting provider who gives hosting for cheap, but pricing is not the only factor to consider, there are several more factors to keep in mind before selecting a hosting provider. Let us go through key factors that one should keep in mind before choosing the right hosting provider who would resolve all your problems related to your website.

1. Speed & Performance

The speed of your website reflects the speed of your business as well. It gives the first impression about your business when a customer goes to your website. People won’t wait if your website takes long to load. Research has proved that websites taking more than 3 seconds to load have maximum bounce rate. No one would want their potential customers to leave before your website loads. Therefore, speed and performance of your website play a major role in building a reputation of your business and also gives an impression about you.

To test and be sure about the speed and performance of your web hosting provider you can check:

• if servers are on multiple continents

• if they have servers with SSD’s which will load website faster

• if HTTPS is supported by your hosting provider since that is faster than basic HTTP

• ask questions to the company regarding hardware and software upgrades

2. Security, Backup & Reliability

The security of your website is extremely important especially if you’re dealing with e-commerce, personal and credit cards details, etc. the trend of hackers hacking websites and infecting with malware and virus can be harmful to your business and can give them access to your and visitors information. This also makes your website slow that will in turn increase bounce rate. Additionally, if your website is not safe and is affected by a virus, Google shows an embarrassing sign of website not being secure which gives a bad impression of your website.

You have to make sure that your web hosting provider is committed to taking care of the security, reliability, and stability of your website. The following points should be considered to check the security and reliability:

• If the provider is running the latest server software for e.g. Apache, MySQL or PHP

• If they provide automatic updates for CMS

• If they use any systems that can track your traffic and stop hackers when they attempt to access your admin dashboard

Backup is also an important part. Anything can happen to your website and all your data might vanish, therefore, it is important to have a backup. Ensure that your hosting provider has backup options and do regular backup. Many hosting providers leave this part to the user. It is important that you have backups every day and that you can restore them easily.

3. Features

Hosting providers should offer features that support the way the users prefer. See to it that they provide system software and services and CMS, database, operating system, etc. that you will need to manage your website. Control panel like cPanel, tools like SSL, FTP, SSH, WordPress plugins, storage and bandwidth, all these features should be considered and checked. Depending on your and your websites needs ask your host and ensure that they provide with features.

4. Pricing

The pricing that you go for should suit your requirements and business. Compare the features they provide and the price. Don’t pay for features they don’t provide and be unsatisfied. There are hosting providers who provide free hosting but they recover that cost from the ads that will pop up on your website which cannot be removed. Therefore, free hosting is not recommended if you want professionalism.

Check if the payment plans are affordable and combine it with the features and support they provide.

5. Reputation

Your website needs hosting provider that can be trusted and is a reputed one. Check the about us page on their website and get to know about the company, their story, history, etc. Check their social media sites and go through the reviews, responding time, complaints, feedbacks, etc. Go through their website thoroughly and check their blogs, topics of blogs, transparency, etc. All this will help you understand the reputation of the company and how well they are doing with existing customers.

6. Customer support

It is important to know if the hosting provider is available for help when you need them. You may need help with technical stuff and billing but people compromise it for lower cost. Remember having customer support is very crucial and you may need it anytime. Many hosting providers have FAO’s, Community networks, telephone support and email support to solve queries of the user. Make sure that the hosting provider’s customer support is 24x7 available and that they are friendly.

These are the 6 key factors that should be considered before going for a hosting provider for your website. All web hosting providers differ from each other in some way or the other and all have different features and advantages. Now it all depends on you to select the right one for your website.

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