What to Take Into Account When Choosing Website Hosting

It is no longer optional to have a website; in fact, it is almost mandatory to add a website to your digital media marketing arsenal. You will need to host your website with a hosting company in order for it to be available on the internet unless you are in a position to host your own website.

There are many website hosting companies available world-wide for you to choose from; however, in order to ensure that your website is a successful part of your media marketing toolbox, there are several aspects you need to take into account when looking for a web hosting company:

1. Dependability or uptime

It’s crucial that your website is easily accessible by your customers 24/7, 365 days per year. There is nothing that chases a client away more than a website that is down. Consequently, you need to look for a hosting company that has a reputation for being up for at least 99% of the time. It’s also important to make sure the company offers mirrored backups on many different server machines. Therefore if one server goes down, the company is able to switch to another server.

2. Customer support

Websites and hosting servers can go down for a multitude of reasons. There is no way of avoiding this fact. In order to mitigate the negative effects of your website being down, you need to look for a web hosting provider that offers free customer support 24/7 in the language of your choice. Failing that, the company needs to at least offer English customer support. Apart from not being able to get hold of your web hosting company, there is nothing worse than having to deal with customer support personal who cannot communicate in English.

3. Value for money

There is a fine balance between over-paying for web hosting and paying too little for a company that has issues with the uptime of their web servers and does not offer quality customer support, amongst others. There are many companies that offer best deals on website hosting which are worth investigating.

4. Network traffic and shared hosting

Different web hosting packages offer different amounts of network traffic that is allowed to access websites hosted on their servers. This is more applicable to websites that are hosted on shared servers. In a nutshell, each server can only handle a certain amount of traffic and this number is usually split up between the number of websites hosted on the one server. If at all possible, consider signing up for a package that includes unlimited network traffic to and from your website. In order to achieve this you will more than likely have to sign up for a package that does not include shared hosting as part of the deal.

Final words

It is vitally important that you spend time researching which is the best website hosting company to suit your needs; otherwise, you will end up being tied into a contract which is detrimental to your business.