If you are a small business owner, you probably already know that a website is a must so here is a little help in selecting web hosting for small business. There are many hosting services that cater to individuals and businesses of all sizes, and we have some advice for small business owners new to web hosting who are trying to pick the right service for their needs.
These days, your company’s website is as important as its physical store, if not more so. You might be tempted to go with a cheap or free option at first, but it’s important to keep in mind that your online presence will represent your brand and play an important role in keeping your customers happy. Here are some things we think you should know about selecting web hosting for small businesses.
1. Uptime
Uptime refers to how much time a server is online and available for use by visitors. It is important because this metric affects both how quickly your website loads and how accessible it is to potential customers or clients. If your web host has poor uptime, then more than likely you will experience slow loading times, which can lead people away from visiting your site altogether. The longer your website is down, the more problems can occur with visitors trying to access information about your products or services.
In addition to these issues, another reason why uptime matters for small businesses is that search engines use this metric when ranking sites in their results pages (SERPs).
If your web host provides uptime guarantees, that’s great! But it’s not enough; you still need to check that they’re actually delivering what they say they will. Just because a company says they’re going to deliver something doesn’t mean it’s actually going to happen. You need cold hard data! For that you could search for reviews by third-parties online. If you are really serious you should find and contact someone who is actually using it for years.
2. Security
When you’re shopping around for web hosting, it’s easy to get distracted by fast servers and all the bells and whistles. But if you’re serious about your website, you need to consider what kind of security features are available from the web hosting company.
No matter who you are or what your website is, you need to make sure you’re taking the right steps to protect yourself. Here are just a few of the security features you should be looking for:
Lack of traces: It’s extremely easy for hackers to try and take advantage of websites they can track down, and unsecured data leaves a big, juicy trail. Make sure that any hosting company you choose has a plan for protecting your data by keeping it private.
Protection from DDoS attacks: You may not realize it, but DDoS attacks are one of the biggest threats to your website’s security, but fortunately most web hosting companies offer protection against them.
Protection from malware: Malware is a huge problem! It can infect your website in all kinds of ways, whether it’s by stealing passwords or altering key information on pages. Make sure you’re hosting provider has special security features in place to mitigate this issue.
3. Customer Support
Customer support provided by your web hosting company is extremely important, because it’s the only thing standing between you and the technical issues that can occur when you’re trying to run a website.
Even with shared hosting, you still need a customer support team that can handle both minor and major problems and get them solved in a timely fashion. If your customer support team isn’t great at communication or effective solutions, your website will be down for hours when it could have been back up in minutes.
You need a customer support team that is easy to contact and quick to respond. If it takes them a week to get around to your problem, you’ve lost all that time and traffic. If you are with such web hosting you should consider immediately moving out of it.
4. Scalability
Scalability is a critical aspect of your website hosting plan. The ability to scale resources up and down is a highly desirable feature, especially for sites that have seasonal traffic patterns. If your site is receiving a high volume of traffic, it’s important to be able to scale up the processing power and bandwidth that your site uses in order to handle the increased demand.
When you have a hosting plan with scalability features, you never have to worry about your site crashing due to an influx of visitors. And once the traffic has subsided, you’ll be able to scale back down again.
5. Cost
If you’re running a website, you might be tempted to go for free hosting or cheap web hosting—but that’s not always the best decision. Here are three reasons why:
1. You have very limited resources
Cheap or free web hosting heavily compromises on the resources they have on offer. Even if your new business website starts getting a few 100s of visitors every day, either your visitors will face sluggish performance or your hosting provider will start complaining that you are violating their terms of usage.
2. You don’t get the support you need
When things go wrong, you need someone there to help you fix them. Free or cheap web hosts usually can’t offer the level of support that a paid host can.
3. Your hands are tied
If you want to make changes to the code or make other modifications, many free and cheap web hosts won’t let you. That means that if you want to grow in any way with your site, you’ll have to start from scratch somewhere else.
In short, when it comes to your website, make sure that you’re choosing a reliable hosting service so that your site gets off on the right foot—and stays there!
Best Web Hosting For Small Business
If you want a hosting that ticks all of the aforementioned criteria then you could safely go for Hostinger as it is one of the best web hosting for small business in 2022.
Hostinger has lightning fast speed with their LiteSpeed Server technology, consistent uptime, excellent customer support and it fits in your budget too.
If you are running a small business then you could also go for 5cloudhost which offers almost the same features as Hostinger and is extremely reliable as well.
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Conclusion
How can you tell if the web hosting services you’ve chosen for your small business is really good or just a marketing gimmick? You should do some research to get the answer quickly! See what others are saying about the web host on Google and other review sites, check out their social media pages, call or contact their customer service to ask a real technical problem and see if they could answer your questions promptly.
