Choosing a suitable web hosting company is an important aspect of running your business.
Here are the key aspects that you should expect from your website hosting company.
Reliability
You need your website to be live and available whenever someone decides to visit. Therefore, you want your website hosting company to give guarantees in terms of uptime. The best companies will offer something in excess of 99.5% uptime and will also mirror your site across multiple servers in several geographical locations to minimise any disruptions.
Security
You need your website to be secure in terms of who can access it and make changes, and for it to be protected against cyberattacks. You also need any user data and sensitive information to be secure and protected.
Therefore, your website hosting company should be able to offer a secure infrastructure, active security protocols, the latest security features, guarantees about data (and encryption), and powerful and effective firewalls. They should also support Secure Socket Layer (SSL) certificates on your site.
Customer support
Being able to easily access expert technical help is very important. Your host should provide 24/7/365 support through a variety of channels, including live chat, telephone, and email. You will also want to have some turnaround times and prioritisation criteria built into your contract.
There are hundreds of companies across the globe offering a range of web-related services to suit all types of organisations, such as the examples seen at https://www.names.co.uk/web-hosting.
Dedicated server or VPS
You don’t want the stability/availability of your site to be compromised because of other sites that the hosting company deals with. This can potentially happen if you opt for shared hosting. You should choose a hosting company that can offer you a dedicated server or, at least, a Virtual Private Server (VPS).
Content Delivery Network (CDN)
You should look for a host that offers CDN. This is a way of reducing the ‘distance’ between your website and the person who is visiting or browsing. CDNs usually use either relays or Point of Presence servers to speed up page loading.
Scalability
If things go well, your website traffic should grow. Therefore, you need to make sure that your hosting company offers a package that will be able to deal with this, scaling up as necessary. This could also involve moving your site to larger servers during peak times.
