7 Factors for Choosing Web Hosting Services for your Small Business

With the number of web hosting services available today, it’s more important than ever to make sure you choose the right one. Web hosting services have come a long way since the only things one had to take into consideration were bandwidth and storage space. Today there are multiple factors to consider, and this is especially true when it comes to choosing the best hosting for your business.

What are Web Hosting Services

Website hosting is the foundation of every website. While it may seem less important as a “back-end” feature, than what is happening on the “front-end”, it certainly is not. The hosting you choose will directly influence your website’s performance online. If you choose the wrong one, it won’t matter if you have an incredibly optimized, user-friendly website because it just won’t function properly.

There are multiple types of web hosting services available, each with its own set of features and benefits. Let’s look at few:

cPanel Web Hosting:

cPanel is a popular shared web hosting services provide a control panel to allow website owners to manage their websites, email accounts, databases, and other hosting-related services from a single interface. With cPanel Hosting, you can perform backend actions from a user-friendly dashboard instead of having to run complex commands. The system operates similarly to a desktop application, with an easy-to-use graphical interface that simplifies server admin tasks. cPanel has multiple benefits and features, including affordability, scalability, and ease of use for domain, website, and email management, as well as security, and software management.

WordPress Hosting:

WordPress is a content management system (CMS) that allows businesses to create and manage their website content. WordPress Hosting is specifically optimized for websites powered by the WordPress content management system. It caters to the unique requirements of WordPress websites, offering optimized environments and tailored features to ensure seamless performance, security, and ease of use.

Website Builder Add-on to cPanel:

The Website Builder is an add-on to the cPanel web hosting control panel that allows businesses to build their own website using a drag-and-drop interface, thereby saving the cost of having to get an outside developer to build it. It offers features such as customizable templates, mobile responsiveness, and e-commerce integration. Because of its simple visual design features and ease of navigation, website builder for cPanel removes the stress of learning web development programing skills to build your own website. With Website Builder, you simply click, drag and drop the elements you want, whether for content and design, or the functionality of widgets, and when satisfied, you click publish and your website is live.

Email Hosting:

While email hosting is usually included with every web hosting plan, there are instances when email hosting is required. If the email quota has been utilized on the web hosting plan, having Email Hosting can provide the additional ‘space’ a company requires. If you are still in the process of building your small business, it will allow you to have a professional, custom email address for sending and receiving emails; example name@yourbusiness.com without the need for website hosting upfront. It also offers additional features such as email forwarding, spam filtering, and calendar integration.

What to Consider When Choosing Web Hosting Service for a Business

First and foremost, you need to assess your business’s needs. Consider the type of website you want to build and the features you need to support it. For example, if you want to build a WordPress website, you will need a web hosting service that supports WordPress.

Next consider your budget. Web hosting services can vary in price, so it’s important to consider your budget when choosing a service. Keep in mind that the cheapest option may not always be the best option.

Now you can start looking at the more technical aspects of what to look for in a web hosting service:

1. Server Reliability

You want your website to be live and fully functional all the time because any downtime will mean damage to your reputation, less leads, and less sales. Not to mention, that few people are aware that search engines are also not fond of unreliable servers, which means that a website ranking may be negatively affected.

Investigate:

• What are the guarantees offered regarding up-time?
• Are the providers of the server hardware and software reputable.
• Does the hosting provider have geo-redundancy i.e. server backup in a different geographical location)?

At Hosted.com our web hosting service comes with a 99.9% Uptime Guarantee SLA which means downtime due to power outages, or issues affecting a specific city or region, will not affect your hosting with us.

2. Speed

Another factor Google is not fond of, is a site that takes too long to load. This is because its algorithms have been set to mimic what consumers do not appreciate. If a site takes more than 2 seconds to load, bounce rates can go up by 103%.

Investigate:

• What type of servers and infrastructure components are used?
• How does it compare in respect of loading speeds?
• Where is the geo-location of the data center?

At Hosted.com, we use LiteSpeed on our state-of-the-art web servers and SuperFast Enterprise SSD drives to ensure that our customers experience the fastest loading speeds possible.

We are based in San Diego and our servers are in a highly secure data center in Dallas, which means sites hosted with us will load far quicker in local searches compared to websites hosted on overseas servers.

3. Features and Freebies

While freebies may be attractive, focus on the features that matter the most, first.

Investigate:

• Does the hosting provider include 1-Click Easy Installs?
• How much storage and email addresses are included?
• What kind of security measures are in place?

At Hosted.com all our web hosting packages offer 1-Click Easy Installs, scalable storage, email addresses, unlimited traffic, and all our servers are IPv6 ready.

Furthermore, we include a free domain name registration*, free SSL certificate, free daily backups, 24/7 monitoring, malware scanning and SPAM and virus protection.

4. Scalability

You’ve got big plans for your business, so you need to ensure your hosting company can accommodate not only your current needs, but your future growth as well.

Investigate:

• What kind of packages are offered?
• Is there room for scalability?
• How do the various package upgrades compare in price?

At Hosted.com, each of our hosting services offers various structured packages to allow for the streamlined growth of your business. And we don’t believe in unreasonable price jumps between packages either.

5. Security

Cybercrime is a massive problem around the globe, showing no sign of slowing down with the cost of cybercrime predicted to cost $8 Trillion in 2023 and increasing to $10.5 Trillion by 2025. As the foundation of your website, your hosting should help to protect your website and data from vulnerabilities.

Investigate:

• What kind of security measures are in place for your website?
• What security measures are there for your emails?
• How good is there infrastructure security?

At Hosted.com, we ensure that not only is your website’s data encrypted, by providing a free SSL certificate, but that our servers run state of the art security from BitNinja, Monarx and Imunify 360. In addition, we run daily backups, malware scanning, and offer our customers Spam and virus protection powered by Patchman and Acronis.

6. Customer Service & Support

Website hosting isn’t just a once-off purchase, it is an ongoing annual subscription and knowing that you have the best in customer service and support is crucial when looking for a hosting provider for your small business website.

Investigate:

• What type of support is provided?
• How quickly are queries dealt with?
• How is the hosting environment monitored?

At Hosted.com, our service and support go far beyond the initial sale. We have dedicated Sales, Support, and Billing teams that use a ticketing system to ensure all queries are dealt with promptly. Our entire web hosting environment is monitored 24 hours a day, 7 days a week using sophisticated monitoring software which supervises all aspects of our hosting infrastructure.

7. User Interface

The User Interface or Control Panel that is used by any hosting company is incredibly important, as it must ensure that it is intuitive, easy to use and provides the resources for comprehensive website management. Irrespective of whether you are a small business owner, or are running multiple websites for clients, you must have efficiency and reliability no matter what you want to achieve.

Investigate:

• Is the Interface user friendly and intuitive?
• How does it compare in layout, design and ease of reference?
• Does it have the features that you will require?

At Hosted.com, we offer a tailor-made, easy to use Customer Portal. You can manage all your products from one simple interface, including creating and managing email accounts and installing applications quickly and efficiently.

Choose the Best Web Hosting Service for Your Business

Your web hosting services must be relevant to your website’s needs. If you are starting a small home business, then we would recommend that you start simply with WordPress Hosting, as this should be more than sufficient to cover your website and email requirements.

When you start expanding to a medium-sized enterprise and need to upscale, for example, you may need a more robust service for eCommerce, then cPanel Hosting would be best suited to your needs. However, if your WordPress hosting is sufficient for your website needs, then you can consider supplementing it with additional Email Hosting.

Why Choose Hosted.com

Hosted.com offers our customers MORE: more options, more security, more features, more reliability, and more speed. Whether you’re a startup still trying to find your feet, or you’re already flying high – we’ve got the best web hosting services and plans with your name on it!

 

KEY TAKEAWAYS

1. There are multiple types of web hosting services including cPanel, WordPress, Website Builder as an add-on, and Email hosting.
2. Research the type of hosting your business needs and what the hosting service offers regarding reliability, stability, speed, and security.
3. Make sure that the hosting service you choose is the right one for your business and can grow with your business.
4. The User Interface must be intuitive, easy to use and understand if you want to manage your hosting effectively and efficiently.

*Ts & Cs Apply – please refer to our website
Free Domain Registration applies to the following domain name extensions: .com .online and is only applicable at time of purchase.
Free Domain Registration depends on the selected hosting plan and only applies on 12, 24, and 36 months’ billing cycles.
All listed prices exclude Premium domain names.

DISCLAIMER: All Prices and Promotions relevant to published date. E&OE.

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