Business Hosting Simplified

Find the Right Business Hosting With These Tips

Finding the right web host can be a lengthy process because there are so many companies and hundreds of different offers. Plus it’s intimidating trying to speak to someone with all that terminology.

Your website’s host is a very important part of your online success.

Here are a few reasons why:
If a customer comes to your site and your site is down, you have a lost a customer and trust

If the Google bot (Google’s search engine spider) comes around and your site is unreachable, your site looses ranking in the search engine results page (SERP).

If a customer comes to your site and it takes forever to load a page, you have lost a customer.

These are important issues and they’re the reason you need to stay away from the type of inferior hosting that leads to these problems.

10 Important Business Hosting Issues

1. Know your site’s requirements.

In order to figure out what type of hosting you need, you will need information such as how much disk space your site is using, how much bandwidth you use per month, what types of programs are running on your site, and what type of platform you are running on, e.g., Lunix, Windows.

If you don’t know any of this information, then you won’t know what to look for and the sales rep can’t help you either.

2. Figure out what your most important needs. With so many options, focusing on too many will send you in a loop of confusion. Focus on key issues such as:

• disk space
• Ram
• the operating system
• the ability to install programs you may need
• support

3. Decide on the operating system.

You need to know what type of operating system your site needs to operate: Windows or Lunix. This depends on what your site does. I run a basic html website and it runs on Lunix., if your site needs to run on a Windows system, your website designer will let you know.

4. Bandwidth

Bandwidth is the amount of connect you use up in a month. With a site that doesn’t have a lot of traffic you don’t have to worry too much, but if your site is popular pay attention because you could end up with a huge bill for extra bandwidth used.

5. Disk space

Disk space is also a factor. If you have a small site then you’ll probably have more than enough. If you have a site where you have a lot of files that people download, or thousands of photos, videos etc., or especially if people are allowed to upload files to your site, then keep disk space in mind.

6. Support

Support is one of the most important factors when deciding on a host. Imagine if your business website goes down and your host’s support takes three days to get it back up, what would you do? Before signing up with the company, be sure their support can address all your needs

7. Research the company

I have looked at many hosting companies and even when I thought I found the right one, my research told me differently and I changed my mind. You can try sites like hostjury.com or simply type in the hosting company name plus “review” in Google, and you may find some interesting information.

8. Uptime guarantee

Uptime is when your website is connected to the Internet, and when visitors can access it. So a company with a bad record for uptime is a huge problem.
 
I used a hosting company with excellent support; it was like my own personal tech specialist taking care of my site 24/7 and the time to take care of most issues was under 10 minutes.

I loved that company and their support, but the problem was the site outages were too frequent and that was out of the hands of the support guy. So I had to leave them.

9. Server speed

Speed is very important when it comes to hosting; no one is going to wait around for a slow page. This is especially important if you have a database-driven catalog site. A slow webhost will kill your online business.  

10. Server and account upgrades

Be sure you can upgrade your account without any problem. The last thing you want is not to have enough hardware, storage or ram. If you can’t upgrade, at least be sure you can switch to a better plan

Hosting is an important step towards your online success.
Take the time to check out your host

That's the Way I See It!
Acey Gaspard

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