If you were opening a retail store, one of the most crucial decisions you would have to make would be about the location of your store. You would want your store to be in an easily accessible area, one that has high visibility to passers-by, is safe and has all the essential features that you need for your store. Similarly, while starting an online business, one of the most important decisions that you could make is about choosing the web hosting company for your website. If you choose wisely, most of your business requirements will be taken care of by the hosting company. On the other hand, if you choose a poor web hosting service provide, you might end up making the worst business mistake possible.
Of course, choosing the right web hosting service for your purpose can be a daunting task especially if you are setting up an online business for the first time. To make your task a little easier, we provide below a list of features that every good web hosting service provider should offer and also some helpful extras, which will help you in making the final decision.
1. Web Space Available – Every web hosting service will assign a certain amount of space for your business website, depending on the plan that you choose. While choosing the plan, make sure that you take into account the possibility that your business may expand in the days to come and you may require extra space. Rather than shelling out more money every time you need extra space, you might want to choose a service provider that offers you enough space, especially if you are dealing with a content, graphic and video rich site.
2. FTP Access – It is very important that your web hosting service provider allows you FTP access to your site. Many providers simply allow their users to design new pages and modify existing pages using the web building software made available by the providers themselves. While this may be useful in the beginning when you are still new to the process, it can quickly prove fairly limiting as you start designing more complex webpages. FTP access will ensure that you are able to design your business website the way you want offline and then upload the new pages to the server of the web hosting service provider.
3. Security, Reliability and Speed – As you can imagine, the security of your online business website is extremely important in order to build and retain the trust of your customers. Since there will be online financial transactions and you will in all probability also be collecting personal information such as telephone numbers, email addresses and shipping addresses, you need to ensure that your web hosting service provides your website with the utmost security for all online and offline data. Similarly, if your site is found unavailable or is not updated fairly frequently, you are sure to lose many visitors and hence customers. Speed also matters because a website that can take hours to load can really turn-off visitors. So how do you know which web-hosting company has all these features? Look at reviews, particularly given by users themselves. You can try accessing some sites hosted by these web hosting companies during peak hours and see if the sites are up and functioning as also how long it takes to access the site. Review what kind of security the hosting company offers you against outside intruders and malicious attacks.
4. Customer Support – Another very important requirement that any web hosting company should fulfill is that of providing complete 24 X 7 support to its customers. Most reputed service providers respond to a complaint sent in by email within 24 hours but if you would like 24-hour technical support over phone, then you may have to pay a little extra.
5. Pricing – It might surprise you to find that some of the best web hosting companies are not expensive at all. They may offer you plans that will more than cover what you need in terms of web space, security, and other features and be very reasonably priced. You just need to spend some time researching various web-hosting companies and comparing the prices as also the services they have to offer before you make any decision.
6. Bandwidth – When any visitor visits your website, he or she is essentially downloading data to their computer and viewing this data. Typically, web-hosting companies place a limit on the amount of data that can be downloaded – called the bandwidth allowed. You should make sure that you get sufficient bandwidth so that your website stays accessible even if there is a sudden surge in the number of visitors.
7. Programming Languages – Support of the HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) is now fairly standard for all web-hosting services and while it is used to be difficult finding a host that allowed the PHP language sometime back, this too is becoming commonly available. While you may not know which programming language your website will be using, you could consult the developer you have hired to help you develop your business website. This professional should be able to guide you in finding a host that supports the language used to create your website.
8. Database Support – Databases are now a crucial part of any business website not just to manage inventory or orders but also to manage customer lists and stay in touch with prospective customers. For this, you need to ensure that a database similar to MySQL is available though many hosting companies might want you to pay extra for maintaining more than one or two databases.
9. E-commerce Features – Obviously, for an online business, nothing matters more than the kind of ecommerce features your web hosting company can provide. Some are absolutely essential like a shopping cart program, a Secure Socket Layer (SSL) certificate for your website and the ability to accept various forms of payment like credit cards, debit cards, checks, etc.
10. Taking Backups – Considering that all your business information including orders, inventory, customers and all the website data resides on the servers of the web hosting company, it goes without saying that in case of any server crashes, you are going to lose all your important data. It is therefore very important that you take regular backups of all your website data. However, in addition to this your hosting plan should also include daily backups to counter any kind of crisis. Any reliable and responsible hosting company will take precautions to ensure that your data is accessible from an alternative server even if there is a problem with the main server. After all, a server can go down due to various reasons – maintenance tasks, power outages, natural disasters and so on. To make sure that this does not affect the running of your site, every hosting company should make your website available from two different sources, so that even if the primary source is affected due to some reason, the other source and hence the website continues to be accessible.
11. Website Visitors’ Analysis – Every business needs to know who its customers are, how they are using the site, which products do they prefer and which they do not as also at what point they make their exit from the site. For this, you will need to analyze how many visitors your website has, from where these visitors arrive to your site, what part of the site do they visit more often and stay longer. Again, most web hosting companies will offer some kind of basic software that will allow you to do a preliminary study of your visitors. However, to carry out a more effective tracking effort so that you can make the required changes in your products or website, you might need a more sophisticated version of Web analysis software. Most web hosting companies should be able to provide you this for a small extra fee.
12. Extra Features – While the features we have mentioned above should form an essential part of any web-hosting plan that you consider, some hosting companies may offer many other extra features. While you should not compromise on the essentials, if all other features are being equally provided for then you could compare the kind of extra features being offered by one hosting company versus that of the other. For example, many service providers now offer free tools like chat rooms, message boards, blogging tools, content management programs, tools to conduct online surveys or polls, calendars and many more. In fact, one of the most attractive features that hosting companies can provide online businesses are tools that will help them in online and offline marketing.
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