It can be too easy to overlook the importance of a good, reliable web hosting company for your business website – not least because it’s often only when your website’s host makes a mistake that their influence can even be not.
However, unreliable hosting can compromise your company’s reputation and, as a result, overall success. Here are several vital tips for choosing the right host.
You should consider FTP access mandatory
Don’t even consider a host that won’t allow your use of FTP in transferring content from your computer to their computer for uploading to the web. These days, only very trivial websites can get away with avoiding the FTP method – and you certainly shouldn’t be treating your business as trivial.
Take the long term view and avoid free hosting
Free web hosts typically aren’t ideal if you are eyeing long term growth in visitor numbers and hits, as they often impose limits on how much traffic your website can attract per day and per month.
Carefully weigh up how much bandwidth you could need
Your hosting package’s bandwidth will determine how many hits your site can get per day or month without negative repercussions. Though your own site could initially require relatively little bandwidth if your company is young, we would still advise opting for a host offering at least 20GB of bandwidth.
Consider how much web space you will require, too
Though most websites are actually under 5MB in size, you should keep in mind whether you could soon want much more space than this as the business becomes more popular and so the website expands. Also consider that high amounts of audio and video content would alone take up a lot of space.
How many websites would you like hosted?
Even if you intend to start out with just one website, you could later benefit from setting up further websites to promote various different aspects of the business. We would recommend that you opt for a hosting company that can cater for at least 5 separate websites.
Make sure that technical support is always at hand
Should your business website ever inadvertently go offline, that means potential customers won’t even be able to use it. Therefore, check that your hosting company of choice can offer 24/7 technical support and so help you to rectify any issues more quickly.
Look for support for the latest technologies
Keeping up with the competition in the business world means having a website that can make use of such technologies as PHP and MySQL; your favoured web hosting firm should therefore support them.
Will your chosen hosting be sufficiently easy for you to use?Ideally, you don’t want to face a steep learning curve when trying to get to grips with your hosting solution. To help avert this, we particularly advise seeking a company offering cPanel, a very popular and intuitive control panel.
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