When you run an online business, you need your website to be up and working smoothly at all times. You cannot afford for your site to go down or load slowly.
Your site being down is the equivalent of your being closed for business. A slow site is the same as making your customers wait in a queue, which means that your run the risk of them going elsewhere.
Choosing the right hosting plan is key to your avoiding a slow site or, worse, one that will not open. Follow these tips when buying your hosting and you can avoid both of these issues.
Buy from the right firm
The first step is to buy from a well-established firm with a good reputation. Before you hit the buy button, always circle back and check the latest reviews for that firm. If there are lots of reports of issues or slow loading sites buy forget about that provider and move on to another.
Good customer support
When reading the reviews look specifically at how each firm provides customer support. Ideally, you want a firm that offers 24/7 support. The last thing you need when your site is down is to wait for someone to respond to you via email. It is a good idea to look for 24-hour support because when your business grows you may take on staff that work in different time zones to help you to run your website.
Price
You should never scrimp on hosting. It is rarely a good idea to buy the cheapest hosting.
However, price is still an important consideration. You need to look at what you are buying and check exactly what is included and what is not. The last thing you need is to find out a year down the line that the price goes up and it costs a fortune for you to move your site or websites to another provider. Bear in mind that moving your sites can be time-consuming and potentially disruptive for your business, so it is something you want to avoid if you can.
Enough capacity and flexibility
As your business grows, you are likely to need more server space for your website. You may also need more control in which case you will want to move your website to better hosting. It is important to check with your hosting company that they are flexible enough to allow you to move your site to a different package and that there will be no penalties when you want to do this.
Good loading speed
It is also important that your website load quickly. Modern consumers expect this, and, these days, so do the search engines.
There is strong evidence that search engines like Google favour websites that load quickly and penalise those that do not.
For these reasons, you need to choose a hosting provider that does not put too many accounts on each server. Reviews and comparison sites are good places to find this kind of information.
A good option
A VPS service provided by a trusted provider is a good option because it ticks all of the boxes.
Follow these tips and you will end up with good quality hosting, that is well supported without paying too much for it.
