If you want to get success through online presence, then choosing appropriate website hosting is very necessary. The hosting you choose will definitely determine how secure your website is, how fast your website loads, and how well its overall performance is. But the question here is how do you know that your latest hosting is good for you? This blog post will guide you by providing some strategies that will help you to know if your selected hosting support is good enough.
Check Website Speed
How fast does your website loads, is the first sign of good hosting. A sluggish website can annoy potential visitors and cause them to leave the site. In terms of testing your website speed, you can get help from online sites like GTMetrix or PageSpeed Insights which evaluate your website speed and score them. When a site takes more than 3 seconds to load, then it could be considered as a slow website and your hosting is part of a problem. In addition, open your website on other networks and devices to observe if it quickly loads on a slower Wi-Fi connection or your phone. In this case, if your website continuously takes longer time to load, then it is the possibility that the hosting is not properly optimized for speed.
Downtime (Website Availability)
Downtime is all about a timeframe when a particular website stays unavailable or inaccessible to its visitors. A reliable website hosting provider always come up with a strong uptime guarantee, generally 99.9%. Anything less than that could be responsible for your website at threat of losing visitors, traffic, or sales. If you want to monitor uptime of your website, then you can use tools like Pingdom or UptimeRobot to analyze how frequently your website goes down. If you face frequent outages then your hosting provider is not reliable. In addition, before choose hosting provider, checking their uptime guarantee is very necessary. In case, your website is continuously facing downtime problems, despite a promise of high uptime from provider, then you need to change your hosting provider.
Customer Support
For a good website hosting service, convenient customer support is always very necessary. When you are facing any issues with your website, you need effective and quick help. Hence, you need to choose hosting providers that have 24/7 customer support as they will easily make you stress-free from hosting-related issues. Before picking up any website hosting provider, you should evaluate the customer support structure of the provider by asking them some general questions and observing their quick response ability or how cooperative are their answers. If they provide unsatisfactory solutions or take too long to reply, that could be a chance of an unreliable hosting provider. For more convenience, checking customer reviews is a good option that aware you of the hosting provider’s ability to handle support requests.
Security Features
When you are choosing a web hosting, security should be your priority. It could be mentioned that a decent hosting provider will always provide you with required security features like daily backup plans, SSL certificates, and proper protection against DDoS attacks or malware. An SSL certificate guarantees that the data exchanged between your site and its visitors is protected and encrypted. Without the inclusion of an SSL certificate, visitors may encounter some trigger warnings when trying to access websites and this may raise questions about the credibility of the hosting provider altogether. On the other hand, automatic backup also ensures quick restoration of your website for anything is problematic. If your hosting provider charges extra for security or doesn’t even offer these features, it is necessary to switch to other reliable hosting provider.
Scalability
You always need website hosting to scale your website according to requirements. If your website traffic grows, your hosting needs to be capable of handling it properly without crashing or slowing down your site. Reliable hosting providers suggest easy options to add resources like more bandwidth, storage, or processing power as well as upgrade your plan. If you want to check if your hosting is scalable, see if they offer more advanced choices like VPS (Virtual Private Server). If you see that your hosting can’t keep up or you’re outgrowing your current plan, you may require a more scalable solution.
Price V/s Value
When you are choosing hosting, pricing is obviously an essential factor. A hosting plan could be reasonable, but if it’s lacking in uptime, customer support, or speed, eventually you could end up paying more for technical issues management or losing revenue. You need to check properly; what facilities you are getting for the pricing range you provide for your web hosting service. Does it have backup plans, security features, or other beneficial features? Compare various other hosting providers in the same price range. A higher-priced hosting provider with comprehensive support and features can represent more long-run value to your website. If you are paying more, but not getting much in return, then you should think of alternatives.
User-friendly Control Panel
A User-friendly control panel will always be provided by a good hosting provider for managing your website. cPanel is the very renowned control panel as it is very easy to control even for non-tech-savvy individuals. A properly designed control panel helps you to handle domains, files, databases, and emails without any technical knowledge. You should make sure that your hosting provider provides an in-built control panel that helps you handle your site professionally. If you find it difficult to use your control panel, it will be frustrating for you and you should take necessary measures for it.
Good website hosting support is necessary for a secure, fast and reliable website. To evaluate if your hosting support is standardized, check features like downtime, speed, security features, customer support, scalability, backup options, price v/s value, the user-friendly control panel, and many more. In case these criteria are not fulfilled by the hosting providers, then you have to switch your hosting providers that assure the performance of your website stays at its convenience.