You cannot have a business today and say it is running at its full potential if you don’t have a website to go with it too. A business’ electronic footprint has become one of the most critical ways clients and customers measure the potentials of whom they are dealing with. The first thing most clients do, as a matter of fact, is research a business online before they commit any of their money to a deal.
A strong online presence can be achieved with the help of a dedicated and brilliant web developer, a sales team that makes sure visitors’ and clients’ requests are handled on time and a tech team that helps the visitors and clients figure how to do things on the website at times they may find it difficult to do so.
But all that is nothing if the website isn’t sitting on stable platform to begin with and that is where the importance of hosting providers comes in. Without a hosting provider that can offer you reliable service there will be no website for the other of your supporting staff to work with and neither will there be a place where your visitors and clients can go to.
Therefore, to help you with making the right choice, we will look at some tips to consider when you are looking for a small business hosting provider:
First: the first thing you need to look into is the uptime guarantee a webhosting provider offers you. This is a ruthless world of business we are in and one too many downtimes could make you lose clients for good. Remember bad experiences tend to stick a lot longer in people’s memories than do good ones – that is unfortunately a fact of life.
People who have either not been able to access your site, or have had it crash on them in the middle of a visit or worse, a transaction, will probably never be coming back to visit you again.
Therefore, make sure you understand the uptime guarantee the hosting provider is offering you and do not sign up with any of them that offer anything less than 98% uptime. Also, don’t just take their word for it, do some research and you should be able to find out a lot about their track record.
Second: you are not in the business of hosting and running websites, and that means you shouldn’t have more than the basic IT know-how in the house (developer, at the most). The other side of your website should be fully taken care of by the provider. When something goes wrong, they should be able to help you out immediately – you can’t afford downtime, remember?
Do a thorough research to find out the provider’s support track record. Be careful to not be biased by fake claims made by individuals. To play it safe, collect data and work with averages.
Next, look into response and resolution times, number of ways of contacting support, times of availability (24/7 is always preferred), whether they have local representative you can directly deal with or premium subscriptions that will allow you VIP treatment (it will come in handy).
Third: you should always be prepared for a totally catastrophic event – complete loss of data, for example. Whether it is accidentally deleting your own folder, or the server your site is hosted on has a meltdown and takes all your data with it, you should be able to be back up and running in a matter of hours – at the most.
Back up of data is vital and you should make sure your provider has a plan which allows for the least amount of interval times between backups. You don’t want too much to have changed before your next backup. As a matter of fact, although it might cost you a little more, you should seriously consider providers with mirror servers where everything is duplicated and in case of a disaster on one server, another one seamlessly takes over.
Fourth: you (or your tech guy) should be able to access all the files and folders of your website. You should be able to make changes to folder structures and set permissions on them. In short, your site should be fully accessible to you. If there are too many restrictions or you are unable to do installs and configurations of apps and other ware because the provider doesn’t allow it, you should probably be looking for another hosting provider.
Fifth: your business can grow suddenly (new acquisitions, etc.) or you might have a sudden surge of traffic (new product release, etc.), and whatever the reason may be, a time might come when you might need to get more resources for your site.
The way your provider handles scalability is critical. You shouldn’t have to bring your site down until it is moved to a new plan. You shouldn’t have to have it crash every time you reach your bandwidth limits. Scalability should always be invisible to you and, most importantly, to your visitors.
On a closing note, make sure you test all the points mentioned above by taking the limited-days free hosting offers – if they don’t have it, don’t sign up!
