Key Considerations for Choosing Hosting for Your Business

Your business website needs a hosting partner that offers up-to-date security for your files. With a reliable customer service and regular maintenance services, the best hosting company will ensure continuity for your business.

Server Reliability

When choosing a web hosting service, consider the company’s overall reliability. Unstable network connections can easily make your website inaccessible to customers. Your rank on search engine results pages will suffer for same reason. A 99.9% uptime score is considered a good marker of quality service. Anything less could affect your website’s online presence, cutting down traffic and costing you money.

High availability networks have high uptime scores because they have redundant hardware to ensure your website is hardly ever down. this involves having servers in a defined cluster such that should one fail, the other takes up functionality to maintain service delivery.

You should also pitch camp with a web hosting service that gives you adequate room for growth. If you envisage your website attracting a lot of traffic and hosting a lot of files in the future, you should incorporate that in your choice of web hosting. How many addon domains can you keep, for example, and how many emails can you create to match the growth of your business? Is your hosting plan upgradeable?

Security

A server is like a home for all your website files. Just as you wouldn’t want your home appliances left unguarded, you should consider a web hosting provider that takes security very seriously. A good hosting company must do regular network monitoring to avoid server-to-server and account-to-account malware transfer, especially in shared hosting. Web servers must be configured for security first. A Web Application Firewall (WAF), for example, can help filter the traffic coming to your server in order to defend your files against illegal access. A good hosting provider would have standard security in place to ensure email access is encrypted and firewalls are tuned up to minimize the risks of cyber attack. Although server security is not all there is, it’s the starting point. As a website owner, you also need to ensure that you take measures to secure your website against cyber attacks.

Because website traffic is important, if not critical, to businesses, it is important that your website doesn’t fall victim to a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) and Brute Force attacks. A DDoS attack overwhelms your server with traffic and forces it to shutdown, thereby denying your real clients legitimate access to your website. Whiles a brute force attack may result in your password getting hacked. A well-configured firewall and other intrusion detection systems can help limit illegal third-party access to your business files.

Email security is very crucial for the well-being of your business website. An insecure email server will leave you at the mercy of hackers who can use it as a route to compromise other internet users and pepertuate more crime. Email spoofing also results in people sending spam in your name. Make sure the hosting company offers robust email security that uses Sender Policy Framework (SPF), DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), and Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance (DMARC) authentication methods to secure your messages.

Security is doubly important if you are collecting data from clients. At the very least, your site should have an SSL certificate. This certificate means data collected is encrypted to prevent hackers from stealing customer data. The sign of a secure padlock on a customer’s browser when they visit your site builds trust. Your hosting provider should be able to provide SSL certificates, whether paid or free.

In addition, you want a hosting company that offers malware and rootkit scanning to protect your business from the reputation damage associated with having your site blacklisted. Malware and rootkit scanners are typically set to run daily and scan all websites on the server. If an infection is discovered, the website is quarantined to curtail the intentions of the hacker. This saves the problem from getting exacerbated quickly. And brings it to your attention quickly before other blacklist providers like Google and Symantec can see it.

Customer Service

Web hosting has unique challenges. Because a host keeps your files running on its selected servers, it is important that you are able to reach them all the time. A web hosting provider without a 24/7 support can leave you hanging for hours at a time. Also, online chat support and social media presence are important indicators of real-time support. Support tickets are also very good, as they enable you to copy and paste error outputs for the interpretation of support teams expediently. Whichever means of support is available, responsiveness is important.

One way to test a web host’s credibility is to read reviews on how it handled past issues. Speak to other clients if you have a chance. This will give you a better perspective on what they promise to give and what they actually offer.

Backup

The more regular the backup, the more secured your business files will be. Automatic daily backups are always preferred. Note that backing up your files is your primary responsibility as data owner. However, where a hosting company offers regular backup options, you should take up the option as an additional measure for data protection.

All backups should be secured off-site and off-server. This keeps the integrity of your data even when there’s a security breach. A backup that is on the same server faces the same risk as your running network and will put the future of your business at tremendous, if not irreparable, risk.

When the hosting server offers complimentary backup services, understand whether or not they will help you restore corrupted or stolen data from your backup repository. The key is to have a disaster recovery plan that you can build upon with your own in-house best-practices.

Shared vs Dedicated Hosting

If you are building a small business website, a shared hosting could be ideal for you. Under this arrangement, your website files share room with other websites on the same server. Because you share resources with other websites, they have a direct effect on how quickly your website can be accessed. Another website that uses a lot of processing power on your server will limit your website’s speed.

If your site grows bigger or you happen to need more computing resources to cater for your increased traffic, you might want to consider a dedicated server. This is more expensive, but will give you the room to host more files and deploy your own security features and server functionality. You can even have experts take care of it for you.