The 5 Essentials For Choosing The Best Hosting Service For Your Website

Without hosting services, there would be no website. Even then most people often ignore the need for better hosting options in the event of surging traffic or decreasing website loading speed. Even for the simplest of the simple CMS platforms and website builders, you will need a reliable hosting service to boost your traffic and your SEO.

A lot of discussions has been going on about VPS, cloud hosting, dedicated hosting and shared hosting services. These blogs, articles and discussions may help a few, but for the most readers, the serve to confound them even more. WordPress users from all across the world struggle with choosing the best hosting providers for their site, especially because WP provides such a unique user experience. To make things easy for you and your future website visitors, here are a few tips that will help you choose the perfect hosting provider.

1. Evaluate your needs

Some websites have small target groups. When you are writing for or selling to about a 1000 people in your locality, you might want to save a few bucks. This is fairly common for lawyer's offices in small towns, restaurants in the city and digital marketing agencies that cater to a particular locality. Unless you are addressing a million users or hoping to reach a few hundred-thousand readers in less than a month, you can do with shared hosting. For larger corporations, fintech services and pan-Australian organisations, VPS, dedicated hosting and cloud hosting are more befitting options. Most importantly, compare your hosting needs, resource needs and your budget. Paying for stellar web hosting services should not compromise your business operations or other aspects of your digital marketing campaign.

2.  Special services – Do you need to be managed to host services

Managed hosting services provide the complete package. They are a league apart from other existing hosting services since they take charge of your website entirely. This ranges from search engine optimisation, data security and backup, website speed and resources and everything else you can even think of. This is especially necessary for the e-commerce sites, service websites and corporate websites that expect thousands of visitors per day. Since managed hosting providers take care of literally each of your site's needs, the hosting charges can be higher than what you have been paying for your shared hosting or your cloud hosting.

3. Technical support

No hosting is good enough if the provider does not provide the best technical support. Look for a hosting service that allows you access to trained support 24x7. Providers that outsource their client calls are never going to satiate the need of a dedicated website manager or SEO strategist. Each time you pick up that phone and dial your web host service, you should be able to reach a human support expert.

Always check their reviews and customer testimonials. This will give you a fair idea about their customer policies. Your chosen web host should never hold customer support second on their priority list. Do not opt for companies that allow their customers to reach them via email or generate complaint tickets for their clients.

4. Control panel and the tech

Even with tech support, not all webmasters know how to set up their FTP accounts. No matter how tech-savvy your current host is, if they do not allow you to update your accounts with just a few clicks, the service is simply not worth it. You should have access to a central control panel that should take you to your CMS and database. The top providers always choose cPanel for easy website modification and management.

Be very particular while asking what kind of hardware they use and to what extent they rely on the hardware. This is very important for VPS and cloud users since they want the ease of access and inherent security that come with cloud hosting services. Having too many basic functions on resident servers defeats the purpose of using cloud hosting or virtual private hosting.

5. Opportunities to scale up

Choosing a web host partner by spending a fortune should lead to a long-term relationship. This is rarely the case for smaller company websites that see nebulous growth with a short span of time. Your provider should make upgrading easier than switching to another provider. It is, of course, possible to transfer your site to another provider, but that takes considerable time, effort and money. Your provider should give you the storage, speed and security you need to grow.

Thankfully, finding a web host provider for WordPress and other sites is not that tough anymore. Check out the best web host providers list of 2018 for getting a clear idea about the features, prices and benefits you should be enjoying.