There are several important features that you should be looking for when you choose a hosting company for your website. It will your task to go on the websites of different hosting companies and make your research and see what they offer.

When you look at all the features hosting companies offer, you need to keep in mind what kind of website you would like to create for your business. Whether it’s a travel blog, a simple business website, a simple blog, a membership website, a portfolio website or an e-commerce website with lots of traffic.

Available storage

Depending on the type of website you decide to create for your business and your website’s purpose you will need a lot of little storage to store all your website files. If you have a website with a lot of information, pages, images, plugins, and videos you want to make sure that your hosting provides enough memory to store all these files.

If you have a simple website that doesn’t need a lot of storage you want to make sure that you don’t spend a lot of money on unnecessary storage that you don’t need. Storage space is normally measured in gigabytes (GB). Most websites don’t need more than 20GB of storage. But if you have a huge website with thousands of images you want to make sure that you have enough storage for all this information. Because if you don’t your website will be very slow and we don’t want that.

If at the moment you have a simple website, but you plan to make it more complicated in the future, a lot of hosting providers propose memory extension options. So don’t worry if you choose a cheaper plan if you just starting, you can always upgrade it in the future.

You want to make sure that your website, images, and all files are properly optimized and compressed so that they don’t take up a lot of unnecessary space. I will talk about website optimization in my future blogs. I learned it the hard way. I didn’t do the necessary work at the beginning which affected my website speed a lot and make me lose a lot of time optimizing it.

Your monthly traffic

Many hosting providers out there have a website traffic limit for the websites. If your website will have a lot of traffic and it exceeds your plan, the hosting company will charge you additional fees for any “extra visitors” or might even stop displaying your website on the web.

When you make your research and choose a hosting try to pay close attention to the informational hosting company provides and choose a hosting company that has unlimited data traffic. This way you will avoid any additional costs and the risk of your website being down in the future. It’s especially important for high-traffic websites.

Customer support

It’s absolutely vital to choose the hosting that has good customer service that can assist you and help you to solve any issues you might have with your website in the future. It’s vital that customer service is efficient and can resolve complex issues fast.

You need to check what channels the hosting company use to communicate with their clients. If you’re for example based in Europe and your hosting is based in the US it’s probably a bad idea to choose a hosting that you contact only by phone as it will be very expensive! It’s good when hosting companies offer chat, email, and phone options. From my own experience, I can say that chat is probably one of the most effective ways of contacting the hosting company and asking for help.

Loading speed

Your website must load fast. The speed of the website will affect the user experience on your website, the bounce rate, and the number of users you have on your website. Google will always prioritize fast-loading websites which will affect your SEO tremendously. Hosting places an important role in your website speed.

It’s exactly the horrible speed of my website that pushed me to make a deep research about hosting companies and change the one I was using before.

I did everything to improve my website speed and spend a lot of time optimizing everything. But the website was still very low it’s when by using different tools to measure website speed like PageSpeed Insights, GTMetrix.com, and WebPageTest.org I found out that the hosting was the main problem and that it was slowing down my website the most.

So make sure that the hosting company you choose have a great loading speed. It may seem insignificant, but the speed will determine if your website user will be actively consuming your content, or if they will be annoyed by the slowness of your website and leave it.

Your budget

Hosting companies have different price rates starting from 1$ per month to 100$ per month and more. When you just starting your business the price Will probably guide your choice of a hosting company, as often we have a limited budget. And to be honest you don’t need anything too fancy and expensive in the beginning.  Although, it’s probably a bad idea to choose to a hosting company based exclusively on price and go with the cheapest option. It might seem like a good choice in the beginning, but in a long run, it’s a bad idea.

You want to be attentive and read very carefully what is written on the hosting company’s website, as often they offer a very cheap price for the first year and it’s of course written in huge bold font. But in the second year the price can go up tremendously and it just doesn’t worth it. Often it’s way too expensive for the services they provide.

The price and people’s review who claimed that it was the best hosting option for WordPress was the breaking point for me when decided to go with Bluehost. Yes, it was okay for the first year of my business, and it was cheap, but in the second year, it was much more expensive and almost equal to the price for much better hosting companies out there. 

So always keep in mind your business website purpose and make your research thoroughly to make the best choice to avoid any extra cost.

Security

Security is important for every website on the web. So you want to make sure that your hosting provider can protect their customers from hacking and provide regular backups. Bad security can affect negatively your website, your revenue and your brand.

Check the process the hosting company has in place to fix your website if the worst happens and your website is hacked.

Regular and reliable backups of your WordPress website which includes all your files and database are vital. Your website backups should be stored off-site, But not on your server. This way if the worst happens your server’s database got corrupted somehow you can always restore your backups that are safely stored somewhere else. You can also use various WordPress plugins to do that but keep in mind that most of the plugins are paid.

You want to make sure that your hosting also proved your website with SSL / TLS Certificate Support. It makes your website secure on the internet. This means that you have a small padlock and icon in your browser, and the URL starts with “https://” instead of “http://”. Most of the hosting companies include this option in the price and handle SSL certificate installation for you. Google has encouraged all sites to secure visitor information with SSL Certificates. That means that whether the Website collects personal information or not, Google will reward sites with SSL Certificates with a boost in search ranking. Here is what a secure and non-secure website looks like in a browser tab: