Website hosting should be a major concern of anyone interested in having a website.
If a potential customer finds your site listed in the search engine results and clicks, but your site doesn’t come up, chances are that person won’t ever become a customer.
Believe it or not, website hosting is one of the biggest challenges that many website owners face. There are countless hosts available, and all promise great service – many at ridiculously cheap rates.
This often influences first time website owners to choose a host based on the prices offered instead of the host’s true capabilities…the result is often utter disappointment.
However, there are ways to prevent you from locking yourself into a year or more of poor hosting. Most of that starts with good research.
One option is to discuss web hosting with your designer, as many do offer hosting services. Your web designer might even offer you a special rate for your service simply because you will be combining services. If your web designer does offer hosting services, you should definitely inquire about website uptime and use a third party to verify that uptime claim.
For those unfamiliar with the term, uptime is the period that your website is available to visitors through the hosting server. Your goal should be to find a reliable hosting service that has an uptime exceeding 99%.
Obviously, when referring to uptime, the higher the percentage the better. You don’t want your visitors showing up to a site that they cannot access.
Of course, not all web designers offer hosting, but this does not mean that your web designer cannot refer you to a reliable hosting service. In fact, getting a recommendation from your web designer is often a great way to locate a hosting service that you may choose to remain with for the life of your site.
Why? Well, web designers are in the industry. They can often tell you which hosts offer the highest uptime, the best customer service, the most support options, the most disk space, the highest bandwidth, a good variety of programming options and more.
Price and other services like being able to purchase domains or content creation should factor in as well, but the prior factors mentioned should take the front seat in your decision-making process.
Price might be a major factor for you, but if choosing a cheap host means that you are losing customers, you are going to lose more than you gain in the long run.
