If you are starting an online business you need to host your website. To have a great experience you have to work with the best web hosting company. Here are features that you should look out for when looking for a good web host:
Customer service
In the online world things can go wrong any time. When your site goes down you need to have a reliable company that you can easily reach. Many companies will advertise themselves as the cheapest in the market, but wait until you have a problem and you can’t reach them. Before you subscribe to any plan, take your time to test the company’s customer service.
A good company should have plenty of support options such as email, phone, chat and any other. Forums have now become popular; therefore, a good company should have a forum where the responses are made by the hosting staff.
Uptime
Uptime is the percentage of time that a hosting server has been up. While you should go with the best hosting company, remember that even the best hosting company goes down at one point. When doing your shopping, be cautious of the number of nines that a company offers. Remember that the more nines the company offers, the more it will be expensive on your side. This means that a company guaranteeing you an uptime of 99.999% will be more expensive than one guaranteeing an uptime of 99.9%.
Extra features
You must have come across companies offering a free domain name when you subscribe to their hosting plans. Others promise to provide you with content management and web analytics tools. While the extra features maybe alluring, be cautious of them. To be on the safe side, treat the extra features as a bonus rather than a determining factor for choosing a given hosting company.
Bandwidth
Bandwidth is the amount of data that your site passes to customers over a period of time. Different companies offer different sizes of bandwidths. Others offer unlimited bandwidth. Before you make your decision, understand your needs. If your site will be having plenty of videos and graphics, it will require more bandwidth than that dealing with plain HTML. Be cautious of companies promising you unlimited bandwidth as some companies might be having a catch.
Conclusion
These are the factors that you should look out for when looking for a reputable web hosting company. Remember that there are plenty of affordable, good hosting companies; therefore, don’t overpay for hosting.
