Your hosting provider is an integral part of your business. Without a stable platform to sit on, your whole business could be adversely affected. You should always strive to find the best web hosting provider you possibly can. If you find your current hosting provider doesn’t meet all your needs, you shouldn’t just accept it. With a little research, you can find a great provider that’ll make you happy and help your business succeed.
On the other hand, if you have the best hosting provider for your business, you should know it! Don’t let your relationship with your current provider go due to a misunderstanding; know when you have a company that would bend backwards for you and your business.
So, the question becomes, how do you know when you have the best hosting provider? Let’s look at some signs that let you know you’ve made the right choice.
1. Excellent Uptimes
Most hosting providers claim their servers are up over 97 percent of the time. Some larger companies promise to deliver zero downtime, even when they have to take their servers down for scheduled maintenance. During this time, they usually move or replicate your site on another server, ensuring that it still runs and functions as it should.
If your hosting provider delivers on an uptime rate of anything above 99 percent, then you have a winner.
2. Latest Features
The main reason servers and devices get hacked is because they’re not updated regularly. The bad guys are always on the prowl, looking for exploits that become available because a patch or an update has been forgotten or omitted.
If your hosting provider offers you the latest versions of all software and solutions, then you can count on them to keep you a little bit safer. Make sure you keep an eye on their updates. A provider that won’t let too much time lapse between the release of an update and when they apply it on their servers really cares about you.
3. Responsive Customer Service
Something will always go wrong. Every single website owner has had their sites crash at one time or another. Unless you yourself were the cause of the crash, the first thing you do after your site goes offline is contact your hosting provider to try and figure out how to get things back up and running.
A sign of a good hosting provider is the time it takes to:
- Get in contact with them. You don’t have to wait hours, let alone days to hear back from your hosting provider.
- Understand your problem. A good tech support team will have the expertise required to solve any website-related issues. They will have knowledge that covers the whole webhosting scope – hardware and software, included.
- Resolve the issue. Once the problem has been identified, the best hosting providers will get your website up and running in the shortest amount of time.
Of course, the hope is you don’t experience any difficulties with your site, but in case it does, you should have a reliable hosting provider to quickly set things right.
4. Ease of Use
Administering your own website shouldn’t be rocket science. In a time when almost anything can be done using drag-and-drop commands, you shouldn’t have difficulty running and designing your website.
A good hosting provider will always strive to make your life easier when you use their servers. They will make the latest control panels available to you.
5. Great Security
Security is essential when it comes to web hosting, especially if you run an online store that handles any kind of payment transactions. You never want your own personal accounts hacked, let alone the sensitive, personal and financial data of your customers. Your hosting provider should be able to prevent most attacks that occur online on a daily basis from affecting you.
If you have a hosting provider that has all the latest software and hardware security measures in place, they will also keep an eye on global news about new methods of breaching servers and websites, taking the steps necessary to stop them. If your provider keeps the bad guys at bay, stick with them.
6. Speed
Whether it is your webpage load time or a process that requires server access and processing power, you need to have results in the shortest possible time. People want their information delivered to them fast. A slow server or connection could kill your chances at ranking high with search engines.
Be thankful if you have good server and connection speeds – a sign of an excellent provider.
If your hosting provider shows all of these signs of excellence, you probably have one of the best web hosting providers out there. If they don’t, make sure you find a web hosting service that does! Browse our Best Web Hosting Picks of 2017 and see if any can offer you more than your current provider does.
