Internet marketing is the act of selling online, and as such one of the things most of us choose to avail to us in order to help us market our product or services is a website, some people choose wordpress because of its ease of use, and free price tag, others spend a few dollars and invest in a premium theme, and still others spend thousands of dollars to have something custom built from scratch.
One thing we all have in common though is the need for reliable hosting. I’m going to give you a few things to consider when choosing a hosting provider, because if you choose right the first time, it will be a partnership that lasts years to come for both of you. One thing that makes most businesses stand out online is professionalism, and if their website is slow, or constantly experiencing downtime, there is a good chance your just going to move on to the next site on your list without waiting or going back when they get it all straightened out.
Speed:
One of the considerations that Google takes into account for search engine rankings is the load time of a particular website. Another aspect to this is that most web users have short attention spans, while others are in a hurry to accomplish their goals, just like the rest of us. If users keep clicking out because your site is taking too long, Google will see this as a lack of relevance for your site as well, which will hurt your chances to rank higher because your bounce rate will be quite a bit higher than it should! Use social media to your advantage here, ask your Facebook friends, or Twitter followers who they are currently hosting with, and compare the load times for the different sites you encounter.
Reputation:
This is probably the single most important aspect when choosing a hosting provider, because you can look through what other customers have had to say about the different companies, and it won’t be long before you find a common theme within the complaints. No hosting company will have a perfect record, because they simply can’t please everyone, but by spending some time doing a little bit of research, you can see which provider has the fastest servers, or zero customer service, or best price etc. Chances are you’re going to be with your host for many years to come and you will want to invest the time to do
Server uptime:
Let’s face it, if this wasn’t an issue most of us would simply host our websites on our own desktops, but the realism is that home computers and ISP’s simply aren’t anywhere near reliable enough. When profitability is measured in sales, uptime becomes crucial, not to mention the fact that a website that is constantly down probably doesn’t give the kind of message about your business, or website that your trying to send. There are plenty of free and paid services out there that will keep track of your list of sites and send you a report when they go offline, as well as a weekly report showing your uptime/downtime for the week. I typically show 100% uptime with my hosting provider, and if I ever show an outage, it’s because of a site or plugin malfunction, but these are rare indeed.
Technical support:
I’ve seen both ends of the spectrum on this one, Hostgator seems willing to help with just about everything I throw at them, including random questions I’ve asked when writing articles like this one!
They have even helped me with setting up a plugin that I was unfamiliar with, and did it within 25 minutes of asking for help! It’s important to know that your hosting company will stand behind you in case you run into trouble. On the flip side, I’ve dealt with companies that refused to move my website to a new server despite the fact that the one I was on was experiencing three or four downtimes of up to an hour each at least once a week! They are now my former host because unlike them, I prefer to remain available to my customers!
Features and backend:
It’s important that your hosting company be able to handle the requirements of your particular website, and be able to offer you a wide range of services and backend programs and tracking features.
Price:
While price is definitely a consideration, it shouldn’t be the definitive one. Take a look to see if there are any bandwidth limits, or storage limits, if you have a highly popular website you’ve invested time and money into, the last thing you want to happen is for your host to shut you down because your using too much bandwidth or resources, this is a common problem for people who have successful product launches. (Can you imagine being in the middle of a product launch and finding out your site is down for over usage?)
Most hosting companies are fairly competitively priced within a few dollars depending on what your needs happen to be, and just because a hosting provider charges a little more I think you should look at a few of the other aspects, such as reputation, technical support, uptime, etc. and leave price near the bottom of the list of considerations.
And there you have it, a few things to consider when looking for a home for your new or existing website or blog, I personally use Hostgator for over 20 of my websites, and have been exceptionally happy with them for several years now.
If you’ve enjoyed this article and are in the market for a hosting company and would like to use my research time rather than your own (I spend about a week researching different hosting companies before choosing Hostgator) please feel free to use my affiliate link to sign up.
Good luck with your journey, I hope you find lots of success!
About Warren
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