The online environment is versatile and sometimes impossible to understand; one day you can be up and everybody sees you, while the next day you can be extremely low and lose visibility. When you are trying to build a new digital project, you have to consider many aspects, but the choice of a suitable web hosting company is a crucial step.
You will find thousands of online hosting providers that are promoting their services, but before you decide to give any of them a chance, you should think about what they offer, from security to better up-time policy or constant support. At a first sight, it might seem that companies have similar services, but details make the difference.
In case you are new to this business or if you want a better hosting provider, which can get you the best results, you will need some help from specialists. Just as an example, we will mention that Hrank helps to discover better hosting provider. Also, it is willing to share some advice on how to choose a better web hosting company.
The first important step is to evaluate and deeply understand what your hosting needs are
As long as you know what your requirements as an online company are, it will be easier to understand what to ask from your hosting provider. You need to anticipate how many visitors you will have based on your services, otherwise you will end up paying too much for a large server or too little for one that won’t be able to keep up with the traffic or apps generated by your website.
Security measures are important
The cybersecurity and GDPR should be among the first points on your checklist. When you want to start working with a web host, make sure that they follow all the protocols from this area, that your website will be protected against all types of cyber attacks and the users’ personal information won’t be shared with non-compliant third-parties.
Check the provider’s infrastructure before making a choice
Nowadays, almost everybody can set up a server and start hosting websites for businesses, but the hard part is to do it well. In this case, the difference is made by the infrastructure and you should ask providers some questions about it before you sign any contract:
- Which is the total bandwidth for each hosting location and how many uplink carriers are there?
- How would they describe their network topology (in terms of redundancy, do they have diverse carriers in order to ensure up-time)?
- How many peers do they have? If they have more, it means that you will receive a lower IP transit cost, increased network resiliency and a much better user experience.
To these, you could add questions about security and GDPR policy. Other important aspects when choosing a web hosting company is scalability (the possibility to support your business’s growth), whether they are specialized on providing hosting for your type of business and the possibility to test their services before actually starting to work together.
