Web hosting is a fundamental element in order to run a blog or website. In this post, I will share with you how to choose the best web hosting for your business website.
If the domain name is the address, then web hosting is the house. In layman’s terms, web hosting is the place where you store all the data. The data might be the text, picture, video, theme, database, or plugins of your website or blog.
There are lots of web hosting providers on the Internet. If your search on Google, there are about 575 million results associated with web hosting.
According to InternetLiveStats.com, as of now, there are more than 1.9 billion websites in the world. Imagine how much web hosting requires to host with the numbers.
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There are Lots of Web Hosting. Are They Really Reliable?
As a new business owner who wants to have a website, the main aspect to consider is to select the best web hosting available on the market. Unfortunately, you might not have enough experience with web hosting but this article hopefully will give some best ideas to handle it.
Reliable web hosting will increase blog performance and at the same time reduce your headache to handle the difficulty.
Since the first day I set up the blog, I’ve tested and experienced four different web hosting companies. Starting from 2007 until today, some of them are very good but others are only on average quality.
Reliable = Great in quality.
Now, let’s figure out how to choose the best web hosting for a business website.
1. Uptime Guarantee
The only purpose you want to have a website is for the customer to know about your business is exist. That’s it.
The website is your “representative” to deliver what you sell to your potential customer. It should be always on and available all the time. It cannot be down even for a second because in business time is the money.
You might have customers from around the world. With different time zone, you need 24 hours availability of the information on the website.
For example, your customers in Asia might access your website during your sleeping time. So, the content should be available at that particular time.
Furthermore, uptime becomes more crucial if your sales are purely from a website like e-commerce. You cannot afford to lose any transaction.
Any downtime or error to your website will lead to lost profit. In the worst cases, you also may lose your customer.
Nobody can guarantee your website is up and available all the time. Not even a web hosting company. No company can offer 100% uptime but they can offer up to the maximum.
That’s why web hosting put the clause called “guaranteed uptime” with certain percentages to justify the availability.
Uptime is a measurement of how a good web hosting company keeps its systems for the website up and running.
A reliable web hosting company offers high uptime to your website. For example, Exabytes uptime is 99.9%, Hostgator and Inmotion uptime is 99.9%, and Bluehost is 99.9%. The different companies with different uptime according to their capability.
What Does The Uptime Mean to Your Website?
It means they can guarantee your website will be up and running 99.9% all the time and only a 0.1% possibility to down. To explain the simple calculation, let’s digest the table below:
Calculation (99.9%):
Daily: 0.1% x (24 x 60 minutes) = 1 minutes 26 seconds
Weekly: 0.1% x (24 x 7 x 60 minutes) = 10 minutes 5 seconds
Monthly: 0.1% x (24 x 30 x 60 minutes) = 43 minutes 12 seconds
Yearly: 0.1% x (24 x 365 x 60 minutes) = 8 hours 45 minutes 36 seconds
The assurance from the web hosting reduces the stress of thinking about the inaccessible website.
In short, to choose the best web hosting, look for uptime. The higher they can guarantee to you, the better your business continuity. It’s because the possibility your website is going to down is minimal.
My recommendation is to choose a web hosting with a minimum of 99.6% uptime because you definitely don’t want your website to be down for more than 5 minutes in a single day.
However, it depends on your business requirements. You need higher uptime if your own e-commerce website which the sales are highly dependent on the website.
You can go with lower uptime if you only want to have a website with minimal content.
2. Cost-Effective
As a new business with a limited budget, you should plan properly to invest your money. In the beginning, just purchase what really need to run your business.
If you can get it for free, just utilized it. If the product has a limited offer discount, grab it.
For me, the price plays an important role in web hosting. It should not too expensive. It should be affordable and cost-effective for the business owner.
Even though the price is not comparatively considered a reliable factor, it always includes in my checklist.
For example, Exabytes offer $4.99/month (if your sign-up for 36 months) from the regular price.
It’s considered very good for initial investment. You can save lots of money which can be used for other things.
3. Performance
Time is gold. In a world that moving fast, we have to adapt to the changes. The best web hosting is able to increase your website speed. Visitors are more than happy to access a fast website.
A sluggish website causes visitor runaway (bounce rate) and also creates a bad reputation for Google ranking.
Starting in July 2018, Google will use page speed as the rank factor for mobile search. It’s devastating to have a slow website.
There are two things that contribute to website speed:
- Web hosting data center location
- Web hosting technology
4. After Sales Support
Nothing is perfect. You might face at least an issue with your website and web hosting throughout your journey. It doesn’t matter either technical or billing issues, you still need web hosting support to assist you.
As a reliable web hosting company, they put after-sales support as the top priority. Customer service is a criterion to differentiate between a good provider and a so-so company.
You put money and trust in their company. Let’s say you subscribe for one year and for the entire year is their responsibility to help you with any issue related to the hosting.
Their reliability is tested after you purchase the hosting, not before. You will know either they deliver the promise (as mentioned on the website) or just want your money.
5. Server and Data Center Location
The web hosting location is where the data center is located. It is included the server, network and other infrastructures sitting in the data center. As a new business, you should clearly define your customer segment, especially on geography or location.
How blog speed and customer geography are correlated?
The closer customer to the data center, the faster the website speed. For example, if most of your customers are located in the United States, so it’s advisable to choose web hosting in the United States. It’s unwise to choose a web hosting server in Asia to serve the US market.
Exabytes data center is located in the Denver Tech Center area, about 25 minutes south of the downtown Denver data center
6. Web Hosting Technology
Apart from the location, the technology that has been used by the web hosting company also contributes to the website speed.
For example, the introduction of a solid-state drive (SSD) disk to replace a conventional hard disk drive (HDD) on the server increases up to 20 times faster than a typical SATA drive. Most reliable web hosting moving to SSD to gain more customer attraction.
The visitor can experience better browsing of your website and reduce waiting time. It’s a good reputation with the search engine. The customers also enjoy browsing your website without hassle.
Another technology to boost speed is using a cache. The cache is used to increase the number of visitors that can be handled and also increase load speed. Exabytes offer their customer cache technology called Ultrafast LiteSpeed Server.
To protect website connection, web hosting also provides with SSL certificate. Secure Socket Layer (SSL) is a security technology for establishing an encrypted link between a web server and the browser.
With that, your customer’s data, credit card information, and personal information are protected. A website with an SSL certificate is represented by ‘HTTPS’ or Secure at the beginning of the URL.
It shows that any transaction made through the blog is encrypted and secured. When your visitors see the secure connection available on your blog, it gains customer trust and confidence to deal with you.
Conclusion
Which Web Hosting Best for Me?
I’ve shared the details on how to choose the best web hosting company. All from my experience throughout the year of blogging.
For a new business, Exabytes is offered more than enough. You can search for web hosting reviews on the internet. There are lots of reviews from persons who have experience with various web hosting companies.
Take your time.
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