Let’s set it straight from the start, your website is your online storefront and which locality you place your storefront has a very large say in what kind of profits and growth you are looking at. And your storefront needs a solid infrastructure backup to keep pace with your growth.
Let’s list out a few things you must consider before choosing your website hosting partner in our ‘Website Hosting Tips’ by our web hosting specialist Anshuman.
Is it built For Scalability?
Storefronts are difficult to scale, however that should not be the case with your websites and hosting. Your online business can see huge spikes in traffic, it could be a sale you are hosting or simply a great blog you wrote. Is your hosting built and ready to scale up without you running up a huge bill that does not conform to the ROI parameters?
Well, most of the website hosting out there, especially WordPress hosting out there are built for handling little traffic and the cost increments for getting something better is usually huge and nonlinear. ‘The usual tendency of a business is to go with the cheapest hosting in the market. This is but obvious, however businesses need to think about growth and scalability right when they take a decision on the website platform’ says Anshuman.
Fault Tolerance and Backups
Prepare for failure. Everything is prone to failure. Even the most reliable hosting and datacenters do go down. Choose a hosting provider that offers backups and restore functions. Backups might come in multiple formats. Some backup the whole disc, some might backup just the database, and some might offer a full backup which is easy to migrate and restore on a different host, should the machine your website is hosted on fails.
Backups do come at an additional cost but are one of the most important ones.
DDOS attacks and Hackers?
Denial of service attacks is one of the easiest ways to bring down a site. Some hackers do it for fun or some others might just be running some scripts to pull down the competition. Some hosting is more prone to such attacks than others. Choose a provider that is running an active support system intercepting such attacks and providing regular updates and patches to the system to keep your site safeguarded from such attacks.
Support is Prime
Usually, ghosting providers charge extra for various levels of support. Choose a plan that best suits your business needs. Or you might want to choose someone local in your area who is able to provide you local phone support. Many local providers are running their backend on Amazon Web service(AWS) or Microsoft Azure cloud providing all the reliability and scalability of these big cloud providers with the ease of management with local support.
Let’s get this straight on record, you are not an IT business, IT is for support. Let’s say you run an apparel store based out of Burlington, North Carolina, you don’t spend all your time and resources on fixing the lights at the store. That is not your core business. Website hosting for your business is similar.
We would recommend getting someone local to handle your website hosting needs.
Here is a summary: Top 4 tips to website hosting
- Choose something that is scalable, i.e will let you handle more traffic
- Does it offer fault tolerance and backups? Can they help restore in case of an outage?
- How is security?
- How is support?
Check out our Website and App hosting service backed by AWS and Azure
