Choosing a web host for your website is a task that needs to be undertaken with utmost care. This is doubly true if it is an e-commerce or corporate one; they need to be up and running 24/7 as a sign of the stability and reliability of your business.
A website has become the face of the business world and your site will be the image your clients and customers first encounter, you can’t therefore afford to slipup when it comes to your hosting. And that starts by avoiding mistakes when choosing a web host.
Beware of the following pitfalls:
- Not knowing exactly which hosting plan to choose: If you are a small-business owner and don’t have a dedicated team of IT experts or aren’t knowledgeable yourself, you should choose a hosting provider with a good reputation for supporting its customers, for example. And even then you should make sure you read the fine print of your contract to ascertain you will be getting all the support you may require to run your website.
On the other hand, if you own a big business, then chances are you already have the technical know-how on your payroll. This means, you should cut support costs and allocate the budget towards upgrading your hosting features.
- Not being able to find the balance between cost and advantage: this is surprisingly a rather common mistake made by many website owners.
Businesses often try to cut costs by opting to not pay for critical web hosting features or the required resource allocations. Somewhere down the line it becomes a costly mistake as they find their business growing and their site fails to take on the new load.
And then there is the opposite – they pay for stuff that are not even remotely related to their businesses or aren’t required for the running of their websites.
Some of the businesses may do it unknowingly (in which case advice from experts is advised) while others mistakenly think that choosing the most expensive plan (and hence the all-encompassing one) is the best way to go. It certainly is throwing good money away, money which could be used elsewhere on the site or project.
The trick is to find a balance between price and advantage before going shopping for web hosts.
- Not testing before committing to a hosting provider: no matter how good a planner you may be, there is simply no way you can predict the technical faults and configuration issues your new site will encounter. The problems can occur due to reasons out of your control – necessary features not being available on your hosting server or their not being correctly configured even when they are, for example. Some things simply need to be tested to find out how they will act/react.
A wise way to avoid this mistake is to take your website off of your development server and test it on various hosts and environments. You can perform the task using two methods:
- You can take advantage of free, pre-subscription offers. Select a few candidates you think closely meet your requirements and host your site on them. Then, try to simulate every possible business or interaction process within the set time limit.
- A quick online search will yield a wealth of sites that offer free web hosting – with or without preconditions. You can use them to test your site to determine exactly what it requires to function smoothly, or you can tweak your site so it can run on as many hosting environments as possible. Once you have the precise information and an optimally configured website in hand, it will be easier for you to choose your hosting provider from a much larger selection pool.
- Not knowing whether to choose cloud or traditional hosting: technology is always on the move and if you plan to stay ahead of your competition you should keep abreast.
For a business that isn’t too dynamic and doesn’t expect a growth-surge in the foreseeable future, traditional hosting is a good enough way to go. It is cheaper, much easier to manage and, unless there are too many variants thrown in, it is a safe option.
But if you are a business that sees sudden increases of traffic at unexpected times and/or if you have clients all over the world and need to cater to them equally, you should really opt for cloud hosting.
Being a conceptual hosting solution, cloud hosting offers you greater leeway when it comes to scalability (it can be done automatically), webpage serving and data replication (thus allowing equal access to clients regardless of their locations).
- Not looking into the host’s recovery time: any hosting provider that tells you they have never experienced at least one down time in their entire history, is pulling your leg – run for the door. Those that do admit to having experienced downtime are being honest, but you should look further into how long it took them to recover from their interruptions of service.
With a little research you can find the downtime-history of almost any hosting provider. Go through it. Always opt for the one that manages to bounce back and get its clients’ website online in the shortest amount of time – your client’s loyalty and trust in you will gravely depend on it.
