10 Tips For Selecting A Good Web Hosting Service
The web host is used to host your website and it can determine the overall site experience you offer to your organic visitors. For this you need a web host you can rely upon. You will want a web host that integrates with the CMS like Wordpress, Magento etc that you are familiar with.
Web host that is good and reliable is an SEO-friendly web host.
These are the point to look for while selecting a web hosting company:
1. If you decide to use a cheap web host service then it will affect your speed and your website may load slowly. This will lead to poor user experience and the search engines may penalize you. Loading speed of a website is a ranking factor in Google. A good web host will help to run your website faster.
2. Sometimes the website can go down because of the problems caused by the web host. Your website may not load at all and may become unavailable to the users. This will lead to a worse user experience and your potential customers will drop you. Google will flag your website as unreliable and your rankings will drop. While selecting a web host go for the one that guarantees 99.9% or 100% of uptime. This will translate to around 1.44 minutes of downtime a day and 8.8 hours per year.
3. While visiting your website if there are errors like ‘Internal Server Error’ or ‘Database Connection Failed’ then your website is having problems in accessing the required files. These errors are encountered when too many people are accessing the website because a video or article went viral. A good web host should have the safeguards to make sure that the server does not get overloaded. It can make use of alternative servers or offload the popular pages so the number of connections to the database are reduced. Selecting a Virtual Private Server (VPN) or a dedicated server is another way to increase the reliability.
4. In shared hosting your website is on the same server as hundreds of other websites. If any of the websites is run by spammers or scammers then the IP address may get flagged as malicious and your rankings will drop. A good web host will immediately kick the spammers off and prevent this from happening.
5. Server location is important if you want to offer a good browsing experience. You should select a server located close to your target audience as it leads to faster redirection. Servers themselves should be fast and they should also have a Content Delivery Network to boost the performance further.
6. Top Level Domains (TLD) are the domains that come after the dot like .com, .net, .org and more. TLDs also affect the search engine rankings. TLD should be easy to remember and share with other people. Using a TLD that is hard to remember can cause loss of traffic. If you are targeting other countries then using a geographical suffix is a good alternative to rank in local results. Select a local host if you want to target the local audience.
7. If you own a website where business transactions take place then your website should be highly secured. Your web host should offer firewalls and other security measures. Your website host provider should have proper backups of your website so that you can recover easily in case of a security breach. Check how frequently they save backups. Most good hosting servers have daily backups.
8. Check the different value add-ons provided along with web hosting. Check if the web host provides automatic backups so that you can recover easily if something goes wrong. Check if it provides HTTPS and supports SSL. Check if it provides different hosting plans so that as your traffic grows you can shift to your own dedicated server. This will be faster and easier than changing the hosting provider.
9. Before deciding on a host, read their online reviews to get valuable information. Check the hosts that appear on the Top Web Host lists and read their reviews. Verify that the hosting plan chosen by you will give you what you need. Get some suggestions from your web developers.
10. A good host will provide 24x7 services for free. You should verify the operating hours of its support team and how to contact them. Good web hosts provide customer support widely through social media like dedicated support Twitter accounts.
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