After choosing a domain name, your website hosting account is the next important step you will take in getting your small business on the Internet. This blog post will outline what your biggest concerns should be when doing your research, and also what questions you need to ask when shopping for the best hosting plan for your small business.

If you don’t know what your specific needs are, It will be a challenge to choose the best website hosting plan. Before beginning your search, you need to carefully consider:

  • short and long term website traffic,
  • storage space,
  • additional domains,
  • updates and backups.
  • control panel access, and
  • e-commerce support.

Important Factors to Consider When Choosing Website Hosting

With seemingly endless choices, small businesses need a simple formula for making the best hosting choice. Below are five factors to consider when shopping for a hosting provider.

Website Traffic

If you operate a properly optimized WordPress blog, a shared hosting account should be sufficient to support one-thousand unique visitors per day. If you expect your website to grow significantly in next few years, it is important to choose a web host that will accommodate your progression from shared hosting to VPS, to dedicated server. You need a company that will deliver more processing power, more memory capacity, more disk storage, and better security.

Add-on Domains

Nowadays, it is common for small businesses owners to operate more than one domain name. To host additional domains, you will need additional storage space. For this reason, it is important to have a hosting account that allows you to add multiple domains.

Uptime and Back-ups

In the event that something should happen with your website’s visibility on the Internet, nothing is more important than having a web host that is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. That said, there is nothing to be overly concerned with, 99.5% and above is the industry standard uptime score; anything below 99% is unacceptable.

Your website hosting provider should be performing regular backups and, if necessary, restore your website quickly.

To gain a better understanding of how a hosting provider performs back ups on your website, Here are three important questions you should seek answers to:

  • Do you provide full backups regularly?
  • Can you perform backups easily in the control panel?
  • Can you easily restore backup files on your own, or do you have to wait for support staff to do it?

Control Panel

It doesn’t matter if it’s a cPanel, Plesk, or a third party control panel, a user-friendly and functional hosting control panel is very, very important. Without access to an adequate control panel, you will be left at the mercy of the hosting tech support staff; even if all you need are basic changes.

TIP: An auto script installer, like Fantastico, Simple Scripts, and Quick Installer, is a blessing to have.

eCommerce

If, either now or in the future, you intend to process transactions on your website, it is important for you to pick a website hosting plan that supports e-commerce. SSL certification, a dedicated IP, and one-click shopping cart software installation, are some of the essential hosting features needed to support your small business ecommerce website.

Small Business Website Hosting Summary

A majority of your small business hosting needs can be satisfied by a shared hosting account. A shared website hosting plan is affordable, easy to maintain, and sufficient for most new websites. As your website needs evolve, you can upgrade your hosting to VPS or a dedicated server.

If your website was your house, your website hosting would be your neighborhood. Would you build your house in a bad neighborhood?

Kristoffer Howes, CEO, Weal Media

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