Choosing The Best Website Host
Whether you have a start-up business, a freelance business, or a blog, a good website is essential for your success. If you’re going to succeed, your website has to be reliable. For a reliable website, you need a reliable host. But how do you find one?
A website host or managed hosting provides the technology and services that you need for your website to be seen on the internet.
There are a few ways to choose the best website hosting plan for you and your website:
Shared Or Dedicated Server
You can get a shared server hosting plan for a low monthly cost, but this is usually not a good idea for most websites. Shared hosting means that you are sharing a server and its resources with other websites. This can have a negative impact on the performance of your site. If another site on your server is hacked, your site could be at risk of infection too.
A dedicated server hosting plan is quite a bit more expensive but it does provide the best level of performance. A dedicated server means that the physical server machine is dedicated entirely to only your website. All the resources are yours, which is more secure than a shared plan. If your site needs to be high-performing, you might need this option, even it stretches your budget more than you’d like.
A compromise between these two options is a virtual private server, or VPS, hosting plan. A VPS is one machine, partitioned to act like multiple machines. This is an affordable choice, like shared hosting, but has similar security and performance potential as a dedicated server hosting plan.
Support And Security
Make sure your hosting company has phone or chat support of some kind so you can get help whenever you need it. Email support is fine, but it can take too long to get a response when you have a more urgent issue that needs to be sorted out quickly. Phone support is usually the best option, but live chat can be just as quick.
Look for a hosting offer with an easy-to-use server interface like cPanel for you to access your server. Unless you have the budget to hire a professional server administrator, make it as easy you can to view the contents of your server or make changes.
Check to see what kind of server security is in place in the server that you’re thinking about using. You will need to be able to access your server via Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP). You also want daily backups to be made of the contents of your server, in case you run into any problems. You also want an easy method to install Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificates. Check that your hosting company carries out very regular security maintenance checks to keep your site secure. Your hosting company should have a security protocol that you can look at so you know how they keep their servers, and your website, safe.
