How to Buy The Best Web Hosting for Small Business?
If you are a small business owner, bringing up your business online in the digital marketplace can help you boost sales, increase credibility and brand presence. When you are all set to go online and build a steadily growing brand, choosing the right type of hosting form the right hosting service provider is very important. This is because you cannot compromise on the essential needs that will run your business website and acquire and maintain customers. Knowing exactly how to choose the type of hosting and a hosting provider can give you an advantage over other similar businesses who don’t have properly configured hosting.
Choosing a good server hosting for a small business website is easy and difficult both. It may include shared web hosting, bitcoin server hosting, dedicated server hosting or VPS hosting. All of it depends on the insight and the server literacy of an individual.
To start with one should get a domain from a domain registrar before choosing the best web hosting service since a domain is required to host a website whether business or a personal website.
After getting the domain, you should move to evaluate what are the things you want to achieve with your website. What current needs you want to fulfill and what needs can emerge in the future. You must be aware that web hosting needs keep changing as time passes and business trends change. What you thought to be important today may not be relevant later after a considerable amount of time. The best strategy can be you can build a list of the things that you want to achieve and make another list of the things you will need with your hosting plan for achieving those things. Finally, it would be great to develop a budget plan as soon as possible and start thinking of ways to follow to it.
Search well-known web hosting services that have good credibility in the hosting market. Since you are going to rely on them for your online business website you cannot neglect the possible problems that you may need to face in the future. The most important features to consider are the bandwidth and the disc space you will be getting from the host. The moment your site starts to grow and reach a wider audience you will have to reconsider on the amount of traffic and bandwidth you are getting from the host. Disc space is rarely needed to upgrade unless you have a video site which contains thousands of videos stored on the disc. You should always get a plan with unlimited traffic and bandwidth so that you don’t need an upgrade when your site grows.
Two main types of hosting
Shared hosting
There are basically two types of hosting- dedicated and shared. Shared hosting means the hosting company provides you a common server that is shared with other webmasters. The provider leases you a small space on a big server like other website owners. All webmasters use the common resources of the server but there is no linking between the individual accounts. There is always a limit to the number of hosting accounts that can be provisioned on a physical server.
Dedicated hosting
A dedicated server is completely owned by you and is solely committed to you. After getting a dedicated server for your website the bandwidth, memory and disc space and all the other resources of the server are only available to you. There is no sharing of the resources with anybody else. So, in the real sense, it is a true dedicated server. A dedicated server may include professional dedicated servers, game dedicated servers, streaming dedicated servers, etc.
While choosing a server you should consider the following points
BANDWIDTH
Get hosting from a company that offers unlimited bandwidth usage for all kinds of websites. If you pay for the bandwidth as per the GB you use you will get charged extra for extra usage. This happens as your website grows and you need more bandwidth. Read all the terms of use for your web hosting company before you register for a hosting account. Many companies shout out loud that they provide unlimited bandwidth but you can face restrictions and limitations when your site grows and you need to use truly unlimited bandwidth.
OPERATING SYSTEM CHOICES
Choosing a server that runs on either Linux or Windows operating system is the choice you must make while launching a site for your small business. You need to go for Linux server for websites that are built on content management systems like WordPress, Joomla or build with PHP. If you want a more interactive website you can have one by coding it in PHP or building it on CMS like WordPress. WordPress gives you access to a lot of tools and plugins that can make your site engaging and appealing.
RELIABILITY AND UPTIME
It is necessary to compare reliability and uptime of the web hosting companies that you find to be worthy of purchasing hosting plans from. Ensure that the company has positive reviews regarding everything from the existing customers. That will give you confidence that the company is reliable and you can host your website with them.
Along with then always get hosting from a company that guarantees that your website will be up 99.99% of the time. This is essential as yours is a business site and you cannot afford to lose visitors if you have poor hosting with low up time.
CONTROL PANEL OPTIONS
Get to know the control panel options you have with the hosting of that company. Many web hosting companies provide you complete control panel that enables you to access all the fines, upload pages and view your site’s bandwidth usage and other statistics. You need to have a very user-friendly control panel that helps you to manage your website easily without requiring a File Transfer Protocol (FTP) program or any knowledge of coding and programming.
CUSTOMER SUPPORT/SERVICE
Get a hosting only from a hosting company that has 24/7 support and has various ways to contact customer service and support. Customer business is necessary since you can encounter many small and big problems with your hosting that can affect your website performance. Since many webmasters are not from technical backgrounds they often need help in managing their accounts and the server itself. This becomes very easy if the hosting company has the provision of customer support.
Conclusion:
Know your requirements for your business site. Think of the resources that you are going to need and then choose the best company that can provide you reliable hosting.