Characteristics Of A Fantastic Web Hosting Service

The web hosting service you choose to use for your company’s website will really impact your overall online presence. Since so much information and communication is found online these days, your business needs a strong online presence. You should choose a program that works to improve your relationships with customers and clients. It should also be free of errors and glitches that can slow you down. Here are some tips for picking a great web hosting service.

Great Customer Service and Support

When you pick a web hosting service to publish your company’s website on, you are essentially partnering up with a team of individuals and giving them responsibility over your online presence. Think of your business like those group projects you used to do in school. You are the leader of the group and delegate tasks to other parts of the team. You give one team member responsibility over finances, another responsibility over marketing and publicity, and put another member in charge of the group’s website.

In order for this group project—your business—to work, you need plenty of communication and cooperation. If your web hosting company has poor customer service and proves ultimately unhelpful when a problem arises, they will bring your business down with them. The best web hosts have 24/7 support and respond to a problem within minutes. (source: make-a-website.com)

Large Amounts of Disk Space and Bandwidth

A website is basically a collection of inter-connected documents. These documents take up space on the web just like documents take up space on your computer’s hard drive. The more pages you have, the more disk space you will need. Videos and pictures are wonderful additions to any website, but they also take up quite a bit of space. The more space your web hosting service has, the bigger, and more interactive, your website can be. Some hosting services offer unlimited space, which will usually cost more than limited space. Pay for the amount of space you need, but make sure your website has plenty of room to expand. Also look for limitations on the size of file you can upload to your site. The best services will not restrict the file size or will have a maximum size that doesn’t limit your website’s needs. Bandwidth, or data transfer rate, like disk space, depends on the service plan you purchase from your web hosting company. You can get either unlimited bandwidth or pay only for the amount of bandwidth you need. If your company’s site has videos or presentation, it will need more bandwidth than a site without those features.

Security

Security is vital, especially if your commercial website allows clients to log in or make purchases online. Security is the main reason people are skeptical of cloud hosting. If you choose a cloud hosting service, make sure it has security measures in place to keep your website safe. Even if you are using managed web hosting services or any other type of hosting, be sure you trust the company you are working with. You could also train workers or hire employees with an MBA in information technology management or similar background to help improve these parts of your web security.

Variety in Programming Services

Most web hosts publish with HTML and CSS programming languages. The most common languages are PHP and ASP (source: webdesign.about.com). The more languages your web host allows, the more control you have over your website. The best web host will include FTP, PHP, Perl, SSI, .htaccess, SSH, MySQL, and crontabs. 

Uptime Reliability

No matter how great your website looks, if your web hosting servers go down, the site will do nothing for you. When you are searching the web and click on a link connecting to a page that is temporarily down, do you wait around for it to come back up? If you are like most web surfers, you just go to a different page. Look for a web hosting service with great uptime reliability. For a commercial website, you will want a minimum uptime of 99.5% or higher.

These characteristics are important for your company’s web hosting service to have. If you just want to publish a blog or a hobby site, you can afford to choose cheaper options like limited programming services or a smaller amount of disk space. Once you have determined what your website’s needs are, you can shop around and find the best web hosting for your company. Good luck!