What To Look For When Choosing A Host For Your Website

If you are starting an online business one of the first tasks you will need to complete is choosing a web hosting company for your website. The hardest part of this process is the fact there are so many hosting companies to choose from, and it can become confusing comparing all of them in order to select the one that is right for you.

To help you make that decision here are seven features which you want to ensure are available and up to the standards you would expect any reputable hosting company to offer.

Unlimited Domains

You will often find hosting packages that only allow one or two domains to be hosted on your account. Even if at this point you don’t think you will ever need another domain, as your business expands it could be that you do. The wise move is to have a hosting package which allows you to host unlimited numbers of domains.

Unlimited Email Accounts

If you want your business to be regarded as professional it is sensible to set up different email addresses for different scenarios. For example, you could have one with your name, one for sales, and one for customer service. A decent hosting package will allow you to set up as many email addresses as you want.

WordPress / Other Platforms

Although WordPress is the most popular, there are other platforms that can be used to build your websites such as Joomla and Drupal. There are also platforms that can be used for e-commerce purposes. Whichever of these is your preference, ensure that your web hosting allows easy installation and setup of the platform you require.

File Storage

If your site is going to have lots of multimedia on it such as videos, then you will want hosting that gives you a large amount of storage space for your files, and ideally an unlimited amount. Although you might not need this now, it might be as your site expands and further pages are added.

Bandwidth

Whether your site is large in terms of pages and files, or small with only a couple of pages, you will want to it to load up in web browsers quickly. One of the main reasons for this is that it helps keep people on your site, rather than clicking away if the site is slow. This is where the bandwidth that your hosting company has to offer is vital, and the ideal scenario is to choose one which gives you unlimited bandwidth.

Guaranteed Up Time

Web hosting companies will normally publish the percentage of time that they guarantee your website will be up. Of all the data that you might check, this is one where you should dig a bit deeper and see if what they claim is the reality. The reason is if your site isn’t live, it is not generating revenue, so you want this to be as close to 100% as possible.

Customer Service

There is only one option you should accept here and that is that your hosting company has a live chat service. If something goes wrong with your site you need to be able to speak to someone immediately to investigate and fix it. Do not choose a host who only offers email as this can mean it takes days to sort an issue.