Looking for the right hosting company seems daunting as you come across numerous difficult terms and characteristics. This article will help you to understand them so that it will be easier to make a choice.
- Building
Nowadays, you don’t have to be a coding master to build a great website. Hosting providers offer a great variety of tools for different purposes so that even a beginner can cope with it. You can create a website with pizzazz on your own using modern web builders such as Boldgrid.
However, remember that such web tools as WIX and Weebly are of different origin. They are not entirely hosting elements. The range of services is a bit limited. It can be crucial for your choice.
- SSD or HDD
SSDs work with better speed than HDDs and it determines their higher price. What is more, they are more stable and require less power. Another great advantage of solid state drives is the transfer rate that is much higher.
Of course, SSDs cannot add “free” and “unlimited” to their characteristics but is much more effective and reliable way of data storage than HDDs.
- Bandwidth
Bandwidth deals with the traffic and data, their quality transmission between the website and its users. It varies from company to company. The high bandwidth is a sign of a reliable hosting company with the good system.
Look at it carefully if your business website has more than 5,000 users monthly. If less, the majority of hosting companies will satisfy your needs for a little price.
- Storing capacity
Don’t rely on the offer of boundless storage capacity, as it has some limitations. Shared hosting will do for startups and small businesses with the need of not more than 1GB. Check out the list of shared hosting providers monitoring.
Don’t use hosting companies only like a file storage only. Dropbox or even Google Drive is there for this purpose.
- Capability to handle a growing amount of visitors
Scalability is very important. Why? First of all, your website should work steadily regardless of a number of visitors. Secondly, your hosting provider should grow and develop with you in order to deal with more and more traffic.
Make sure that your host can upgrade your plan from shared hosting to VPS when the traffic requires it.
- Access
A control panel is given to manage your account. File Transfer Control or FTP is used for transmission of different data.
Consider the size a hosting company offers for the files. An online file manager is also a good option. It allows updating your website even from your phone.
- Support
A reliable hosting company offers 24/7 support to their clients. So that any time you can get guidance in case of technical issues. It happens through different mediums – email, phone, and chat.
What does a 99% uptime mean? Your website may be of for more than three days a year. With a 99.99% uptime, the period of possible downtime equals less than an hour. So, check your agreement to find out the exact uptime. Keep in mind that the good hosting companies give a 99.999% uptime with the possible downtime of 5 minutes.
- Place where servers are situated
To ensure the fast loading, choose the nearest data center to visitors of your website. If your users come from different countries, think about buying a CDN. It hosts a copy of the page and allows visitors to access information from the closest server.
- Backup copies
Finally, backup is a crucial thing you can get from your hosting companies. Make sure to ask for it. A backup copy of files and database is made every day and stored for some period of time.
It allows you to be that you can get back data any time in case of problems, such as hacking, errors and component failure. You can also store your data on cloud storages or locally on your computer for there purposes.
