After you’ve made the decision that you or your business needs a website, the first requirement is hosting. How do you know which hosting provider do you use? What factors are you to consider when choosing one over another? Remember, not every website would require the same hosting requirements as each hosting provider offers different hosting packages with different benefits for each business or individual needs.
Below are the main factors to consider when choosing a hosting provider and host package that they offer.
1. Cost/Charges
When it comes to personal websites and for beginners, the cost of all services involved in the hosting package is vital. The cost can be determined by the features that are offered and how such are offered at initial signup. However, renewal charges either double and sometimes triple. Be sure you understand after your initial discount is expired (depending on how many years your initially subscribed) and know how to pay for the renewal.
Take consideration for site growth as you may need to upgrade either from shared to either VPS or dedicated hosting. Be wary of how much the renewal price hikes and avoid hosting providers that go above 100%. For example, if you’re paying at signup Kshs. 1,500 per month, then it shouldn’t go above Kshs. 3,000 when you renew.
2. Server Reliability and Uptime Scores
Server reliability and uptime scores should be preferably above 99.5% and avoid any hosting provider that reports an annual uptime score of below 99%. Weak servers and unstable network connections mean your website will be down most of the time or difficult to access leading to a poor user experience that leads to lose of business and clients. Online stores or any other website that provides products and services for sale will be adversely affected by server unreliability and uptime.
3. Security
Security ensures that the hosting provider protect their hardware (servers) to prevent attacks on their computers before your website gets attacked too. Their servers have to be secure themselves before they secure your website on them.
Your website also needs an SSL certificate to ensure secure connections between the hosting web server and a user’s browser. It also helps in search engine optimization (SEO) as the site is marked as secure.
4. Customer Service
When one has not technical knowledge to solve hosting problems and hiccups, a reliable customer service is vital to help you get assurance of the issue being resolved quickly and efficiently. Good and responsive support either via a live chat or telephone offered 24/7 is desirable. A social media presence is also a good presence to ask for help. It doesn’t hurt to read customer reviews to see the quality of their support. Avoid hosting providers that provide support tickets and email as a means for customer service as these are way too slow to help you solve an issue immediately.
Also, give priority with hosting providers that have an in-house customer support department rather than outsourced customer support service.
5. Site Backups
Current cyber threats and attacks no longer target hardware but also anything that is connected to the Internet including websites. Similarly, hardware failures do happen like hard disk failures and hence provision of regular website data backups vital.
Consider the following questions when thinking about backups:
- Do they conduct regular full backups?
- Can you manually backup your site via the control panel?
- Can you use third party programs to create backups automatically?
- Can the backup be restored without a need for technical assistance from support staff?
6. Essential Features
Features considered as essential to make a checklist for include:
- Ability to add domains and subdomains (to run and allow for multiple websites)
- Other than the normal disk space and bandwidth, one should consider support for e-commerce and email options as these are important
- Refund policy or trial period when you can try the hosting services and decide whether you want to continue or not. Remember, cancel your account before the last day of trial period otherwise you’ll be charged for the whole package under which you were making the trial.
- Others include one click install for WordPress websites, user-friendly backend, server maintenance, FTP/SFTP access, Content Delivery Network and more.
