4 Tips to Choose the Right Hosting Company for your Website

Most brick-and-mortar business owners now understand the importance of having a blog or website to showcase their brand and reach a larger audience. Creating high-quality content for online consumers is an important part of building a strong brand presence and reaching out to an audience beyond your local customers. A fast, responsive and well-designed website helps you do just that by providing your business a digital address where people can find your offerings and get to know your company.

And this is where it becomes important to pick the right web hosting company for your new site. Choosing a reputable and trusted hosting provider ensures that your website is in safe hands and minimizes the risk of outages and other issues that come with poorly built hosting platforms. To help you make the right decision, here are some tips you’ll find useful when selecting your web hosting company.

Understand the type of web hosting you require

Before you start looking for a hosting service or ask friends or colleagues for recommendations, take the time to understand the immediate needs of your business so that you can shortlist the hosting plans that best suit those needs. For instance, the hosting needs of a WordPress blog that publishes written content and videos will be different from that of a WooCommerce store that sells merchandise.

Enlist the features you can’t do without (such as a free SSL certificate to ensure greater security for your site) and then go ahead and make your choice. If you’re just starting out, you can host your website on a shared server and thereby control your hosting costs. At any rate, don’t choose a hosting service just because it’s cheap. Compare the features and then make an informed decision after consulting with someone who understands the technicalities of web hosting.

Avoid rookie web hosting companies

Experience and expertise are both essential characteristics of a competent hosting company. When there are scores of hosting providers out there vying for your business, you need to make an informed decision. Newbie companies usually offer hosting plans at extremely low prices to attract and build a pool of customers. However, such providers are often not equipped to handle a large number of websites and keep them secure and well-functioning. As they experience an influx of clients, they struggle to manage all those sites, creating serious problems such as downtime, slow loading speed, poor search rankings and an increased threat to data security.

Therefore, it’s important that you pick a company that has the experience, expertise, resources, and infrastructure to provide the support your business will need as you scale. For instance, this SiteGround coupon code allows you to buy a good hosting plan at a discounted price and build a website that’s fast, secure and highly efficient. If you want to build your site on WordPress, SiteGround also offers managed WordPress hosting which comes with a number of great features, single-click WordPress install at no additional cost and automatic WP updates.

Pick a reliable and trusted hosting platform with excellent customer support

Before you buy a web hosting plan, read reviews of your chosen provider to know if they’re reliable and trusted by reputable websites. Reading third-party reviews will help you discover any pertinent issues that could hamper the growth and performance of your site in the long run.

In addition, take the time to read the terms of service and contact customer support a couple of times. Check the quality of customer support in terms of readiness to help, resolution time, and available hours. With a new website, you’ll need all the support you can get, round the clock.

Keep security as a top priority

Another important aspect to consider is the security features the host has in place that will safeguard your website against cyber-attacks. The personal information of your customers must be protected at all costs and at all times, for which you need to entrust your site to a host with a robust security system in place.

A good hosting company ensures top-notch security to protect your site against hacking, backs up data on a regular basis and employs measures to ensure your site loads fast for users across the globe.

Last but not least, don’t choose a web hosting plan based on price alone. Associate with a hosting company that can adapt to your site’s needs as you scale and that will protect your site against problems such as downtime, poor speed and loss of revenue.