A good website is a necessity for businesses today. It’s easy to make one, but to have customers browse and use it is altogether a different matter. This is why it’s important to carefully choose the right web hosting package for your company. Here are some tips in finding one:
Technical Support. A web hosting company with a good customer service base is essential that I put this one top of every other factor. The support must be up and ready 24/7. You must be able to reach them through phone calls and emails quickly. The staff must be able to handle your problems efficiently and capably; they must be able to know the cause within a day. It is also ideal to have your own account manager, someone who will know your account closely.
Quality of Service. As with any decent packages, a customer should always get the bang from his/ her buck – but that doesn’t mean the services shouldn’t be reliable. Your website should be quickly accessible to people at all times. The differences between web hosting packages are usually on two factors: the amount of disk space given to your website, and the additional features and/or applications that you can use to manage it.
Whatever the case may be, the web hosting provider must have the latest technology (for example, support for your favorite scripting language, or perhaps faster tools for uploading your website, or even better, updated and secure database access for your precious information) on hand for its customers. Their service must also be flexible enough to allow the future growth of the website, as well as to add more features for its enhancement.
Server Location. Like physical stores, locations are also important to virtual ones. The physical location of your server can affect the performance of your website to your intended clients. Even if the global Internet backbone is quite fast nowadays, the delivery speed of your website to your target will still depend on the local backbone – and that is not always to reliable.
Hence, the nearer your server is to your intended targets, the less you’ll have to worry about whether or not they’ll be able to quickly see your website. Of course, I’m talking about physical internetwork connections. Website performance also depends on other aspects such as the server’s and/or the web hosting provider’s firewall and proxy settings, security filters, caching policies, and many more.
The web hosting provider must have security features that are lenient enough that it will not hinder your any aspect of website, but should also be secure enough to ward off any web attacks or hacking attempts.