Your website is your online shop window, so it’s vital that it looks great, is safe and secure and works as well as possible. A lot of that comes down to the hosting services you choose. Good hosting ensures your site loads quickly with less downtime, while safeguarding sensitive data.
However, knowing what hosting services you need and the questions to consider can be challenging. In this article, we’ll cover the essential features of hosting, different types of hosting services and aspects to weigh up when choosing your hosting service.
Essential Features and Considerations in Hosting Services
When choosing the services you need from your hosting partner, here are some features you need to think about.
Scalability and Flexibility
As your business grows and more visitors come to your site, you need expert hosting services that can grow with you. Make sure your hosting services can cope with increases in traffic, while your hosting provider must be flexible enough to add or take away services when necessary.
Security Measures
Don’t ignore security when choosing your hosting package. Ensure your provider can offer:
- SSL certificates – to create an encrypted connection between the user and your site
- DDoS protection – to prevent bad actors from flooding your site with traffic to bring it down
- Network monitoring – checking for suspicious activity on your site
Backup and Recovery Options
Regular website data backups are an essential feature of expert hosting services. It’s like a time machine for your site. If a cyber-attack happened, you could be back up and running much faster by reverting to the most recent backup.
Some hosting providers offer automatic backups. If you don’t want to backup your data yourself, make sure you select this option.
Website Speed and Performance Optimisation
Research by Google from 2017 found that 53% of mobile users will leave a web page if it takes more than 3 seconds to load (1). Google and other search engines use page speed as a factor in how they rank their results. That’s how important it is that your business’ website is fast and reliable.
Good hosting providers will use tech to make your site lighter and faster without compromising on delivery.
Types of Hosting Services For Business
Once you start shopping around for expert hosting services, you soon discover there are a lot of different options. It can be confusing to understand which path is right for you.
In this section, we’ll look at four of the most popular hosting services for business.
Virtual Private Service (VPS)
VPS sits between the entry-level shared hosting option and the more specialist dedicated hosting we’ll discuss soon. It gives businesses their own unique hosting space on a shared server, so you get better storage and customisation capabilities, but at a lower cost than dedicated hosting.
VPS is a good choice for businesses that value privacy and security, and those who want to take control of their web experience with specialist software.
Dedicated Hosting
Dedicated hosting gives businesses an exclusive server on which to run their operations. With this option, you have ultimate control over your site, from operating system to security to software and beyond.
It’s one of the most popular web hosting options, typically used by websites with high traffic numbers and more technical complexity. It’s reliable, flexible and scalable.
Cloud Hosting
The selling point to cloud hosting is that there’s no physical infrastructure, so there’s little risk of your site ever going down. If one server malfunctions, service will simply transfer to another one.
As well as being reliable, cloud hosting is highly scalable. It’s simple to add extra services while only paying for what you need.
Managed Dedicated Hosting
Managed dedicated hosting is perhaps the gold standard of expert hosting services options. As well as your own exclusive server, your hosting company will also take care of all the technical services for you, including:
- Hardware and software setup
- Maintenance
- Technical support
- Updating software to the latest versions
- Security monitoring
It’s complete control of your site, but fully managed and maintained. If you’re evaluating managed dedicated hosting providers, ensure they offer all the services you require.
Choosing the Right Hosting Service for Your Business
Knowing which hosting service you need can be challenging. Perhaps you have never used hosting before, or your current service isn’t delivering what you need as your business grows.
A good hosting provider will be curious about your business, dive deep into your goals and challenges and then tailor a solution to match.
At Vnetrix, here are some of the questions our expert advisors ask customers when they come to us for hosting services:
- What are estimated bandwidth requirements?
- Visits per month? Size/footprint of the site?
- IP address requirements? Public/Private
- Computer requirements – CPU/RAM/disk space? Number of virtual machines?
- Do you need migration assistance?
- What are your physical server needs and why?
- What data will be stored/processed?
Think about how you would answer these questions, and you’ll find a path to the right hosting services for you.
Let’s get started
To sum up, finding the right expert hosting services provider consists of three aspects:
- Knowing why you need hosting
- Knowing the type of hosting you want
- Selecting the right hosting services provider
Get this right, and you’ll find a partner that can serve you for years to come.
At Vnetrix, we’ve been providing expert hosting services to businesses just like yours for over two decades. Our experts will assess your current setup and your needs for the future. Then, we’ll recommend the best solution to unleash your business potential.
Ready to get started? Visit the Vnetrix hosting services page today.
Sources:
1 – Google – Find Out How You Stack Up to New Industry Benchmarks for Mobile Page Speed
