The job of a web hosting company is to provide its clients with the resources they need to get their websites online and keep them operating smoothly. Although most hosts will do what they can to advise good strategies for clients who opt for all the wrong features for their sites’ needs, business owners can spare themselves a big headache by doing their homework and picking the right package from the get-go.
What does your Company want from a Hosting Service?
With thousands of web hosts available, including dozens that are well known with good reputations, selecting the right one is a challenge. Add in the multiple hosting packages each host offers, and the choice becomes overwhelming. To narrow the field down, your IT team needs to put some thought into what the company needs in a hosting package. If your website hosts multiple applications and allows downloads, it will require more resources than a site that’s purely informational.
What does the Company need from a Host?
Whatever a company wants its website hosting to accomplish—provide information, host games or create an online shopping experience—a company’s web hosting service needs to accomplish certain specific tasks: be reliable, fast and scalable. Additionally, in order to support an external email system to interact with customers, an email hosting service is also an essential part of a good web package.
How does your Company thin the Field of Hosts?
When a company knows what it needs, narrowing down a host becomes simpler. To ensure reliability, a company shouldn’t even consider packages that offer anything less than 99.5 percent uptime, according to PC World, and plenty of hosts offer such uptime guarantees.
The speed and performance of a website depends on harnessing a satisfactory amount of resources, including storage and bandwidth, so estimating the potential costs of resources is crucial. However, cost shouldn’t be the only factor when deciding on a service package and companies needn’t worry about overspending. By using a website monitoring service, a company can see the resources they’re using and downgrade when they reach the end of a payment period.
A company should also plan ahead for potential growth. By choosing a hosting package that’s scalable, a business owner ensures that, when the need for more resources arises, those resources will be readily available. Scalability prevents a lag in upgrading a website’s resources, so customers don’t suffer as a company grows.
Web hosting packages with bells and whistles don’t have much use unless a business owner knows what to do with them. A web host that can keep a website up, provide scalable resources and have lightning-fast speeds benefits every company, regardless of size or purpose.
Making the Decision
When choosing a web hosting package, a company’s IT leaders should always keep in mind that hosting packages are changeable. With many providers requiring upfront payment for a year of hosting, the provider of your services is generally more important than the services they provide. When choosing the right hosting package, think provider first, package second.
