What makes a good web hosting service? Well, Choosing a suitable web hosting company can be a challenge for many reasons – the specifics of the services are generally not known to the mass consumer, and at the same time prices vary widely. It is also crucial to choose a company that offers you the right package for your business. The efficiency, security, and reliability of your site depend on the type of web hosting plan you choose. Especially in the case of an online store or a business that relies mainly on its Internet presence to generate profit. Therefore, you should consider this list of key features of excellent web hosting.
In addition to the basic hosting package, you also need a company that offers you additional benefits, such as sufficient and scalable disk storage, managed services, email accounts, subdomains, and more. If you choose blindly, especially depending on the price only, you will have a hard time.
So, What makes a good web hosting service?
Guaranteed working time and availability
A website that crashes regularly not only creates a bad impression on visitors but is punished by Google by gradually lowering its ranking in search results. The frequent drop-out of the service (the so-called downtime) is in direct correlation with the position and negatively affects the search engine rankings.
This usually happens with shared server websites where the server is affected by other users. This can happen if the servers are old and do not have good support.
Archiving services
While today’s business is largely focused on the Internet, hackers pose a huge threat. They will send malware to your site and systems, some of which may block your site. One of the features that a web host should offer is an archiving service.
Think about what would happen if you lost all your data, including customer data, emails, inventory records, web content, financial data, and more. The least that can happen is that you will lose the trust of your customers.
If you are in e-commerce, you need a web host that provides continuous backups to avoid losing sales and customer history. With this in mind, you need to make sure that the web host also backs up the data to several different locations.
Continuous customer support
The good thing about online business is that customers can contact you 24/7 and this requires your website and other critical applications to run continuously. This means that you in turn need a hosting service that provides technical support, regardless of the time of day.
When we talk about technical support, we are not just referring to a customer support representative whose job is to encourage and reassure you. We mean an expert who will provide the necessary solutions to your problem in the data center when needed.
Capacity for long-term growth
When done right, your business will grow and your hosting needs to have the tools to help you build your brand online. You may have a small site on a shared server hosting platform, but in a few years, you will need a hybrid solution that includes a VPS as well as private and public cloud hosting.
Secure protection
Cybercrime has evolved so much and hackers are already using sophisticated software to break into existing security systems. These systems allow hackers to scan millions of websites for vulnerabilities. This makes a stable security protocol one of the best features of excellent web hosting.
While it is your responsibility to ensure the security of your site, the hosting company must make a huge contribution to ensuring your online security.
This includes things like malware prevention, strong firewall systems, spam removal, email scanning, SSL encryption, and more. Regardless of the content of your site, if a hacker finds vulnerabilities, he will certainly take advantage of them.
Scalability
While a company is always looking for growth, there are times when your website will get a momentary increase in traffic. That’s why it’s important to be able to get short-term resources on request from your hosting provider.
Without additional resources on demand, your website can be offline. The good thing about scalable resources is that you pay for them only while you need them. This makes them affordable and you don’t have to upgrade to a premium package to cope with growth.
SSL certificate
They are mandatory for e-commerce sites, as they are responsible for the security of transactions and the personal data of your customers. The SSL certificate will encrypt the data and the web host must provide you with at least one.
Websites that do not have an SSL certificate are marked as “insecure” by Google and other search engines, and payment gateways may restrict you from using their systems to sell your website. In this case, you will need to direct your customers to the SSL-certified site to make the payment, which is an additional problem.
In addition, anti-virus companies advise their users to use sites with SSL certificates, which are marked with the prefix “https”.
Easy-to-use control panels
Many webmasters find it challenging to manage a server or website, mainly because they do not have an easy-to-use interface. There are different server operating systems and they will determine the type of control panel you will get.
If you have a Linux-based server, then you need to use cPanel. For Windows-based servers, you must use the Plesk control panel. Both control panels have an easy-to-use dashboard interface, which makes navigation easy.
In addition, they have well-organized features that make it easy to manage updates, change settings, and install the software in a few steps.
Secure email accounts
Many web hosting companies will provide email accounts in all their packages, but a quality business needs more than just the ability to send and receive emails. An excellent hosting provider will ensure that it scans emails to protect you from malware and spam. He will also make sure that the email server is not blacklisted for spammers.
The web hosting company must provide integration services, proper storage, access to web and mobile mail, file sharing, and more.
In conclusion
The above are just some of the key features of excellent web hosting. However, this list will ensure that you choose the right web hosting company. Given that most people have a habit of going through the terms of use “diagonally”, it is imperative to make sure that you read and understand the terms of your future hosting before signing them.
