For casual bloggers or personal website creators, choosing a web hosting provider more often than not simply involves comparing costs and choosing the most affordable. For businesses and corporate websites, however, more responsibility rests on the hosting provider and thus, the decision should involve more deliberation.
Storage Wars
At the most fundamental level, web hosting provides you with the storage space to house all the data that visitors see when they access your website. With this in mind, take a close look at the amount of space provided by different business web hosting services and compare it to the content you will have online. Does your site utilize lots of video and multimedia files? If so, you’ll need to look for more storage space than a site that features strictly text and pictures. If you underestimate the storage you need, you may end up with costly upgrades to your hosting package down the road.
Reliability
A website that crashes or experiences frequent downtime won’t just aggravate your customers; it will damage the credibility of your brand. Most business web hosting services can boast 99.9% uptime or greater, but dig deeper to see if they truly follow through with these claims of reliability by speaking to some of their current clients. If you can trust that your website will operate smoothly twenty four hours a day regardless of fluctuations in traffic, you can eliminate a major concern of running your business online.
Customer Support
Don’t jump head first into an agreement with a hosting provider. Speak with their customer representatives first to get an idea of how quickly they are able to respond to questions and concerns and how much time they are willing to dedicate to your inquiry. Something, inevitably, will go wrong, and feeling secure in the support of your provider will again alleviate the stress of maintaining your site.
