Hosting charges are often an interesting debate.
With so many hosting companies to choose from, how do you pick what’s best for your site?
If you are looking to improve the performance of your website, your hosting is the first place to start.
Most businesses will tell you that fast website hosting is crucial. There are (as of now) roughly 1.27 billion websites on the planet (source). Everyone has a website – from small clubs to larger businesses – they’re all out there online and trying to rank in the search for their own niche and good hosting plays an important part in ranking.
Talk to us today about your hosting requirements
If you’re struggling to work out what hosting is best for you, below are some ‘how to’ tips to choose a hosting package based on requirement, not cost.
1. How important is your website?
Sounds obvious, but it’s one of the first questions we ask our clients (it’s on our website briefing document).
Is your site just an online version of your brochure, an under-used marketing channel or something that is mission critical to your business?
Before you consider a hosting package, simply answer this question – it will inform your hosting choices.
2. No one waits around for a slow website
How many websites have you visited that take just that little bit too long to load?
You’ve Googled something and you’re waiting for the page to load… if you have to wait that extra second – you’re off and back to the next result in your search.
That website that didn’t load in time could have been exactly what you were looking for.
3. What sort of uptime do you want?
100% uptime is a must, correct? If you want your website live 99.99% of the time with allowed outages for maintenance etc then cheap hosting probably isn’t for you.
You’re going to need something far more robust, and that comes at a cost.
4. How much do you value great support?
The cheaper your hosting package, the less likely you’re going to get great support. By this, we mean help from people when you need it that know what they are doing – not a chatbot telling you that your site is not working and it’s your problem.
5. Do you really know enough about hosting to manage it yourself?
Even if you know quite a lot about hosting, it’s very unlikely to be your full-time job to manage it. From our experience hosting is best left to the professionals so you can go and get on with what you’re meant to be doing.
