What to look for in a web hosting service.

In today’s digital environment, having an intuitive business website has become a critical part of connecting with customers, advertising your services and products, and setting your organization apart from competitors. Without a reliable web hosting service, however, it becomes much more difficult to accomplish any of these goals. When your website goes down, you lose potential leads, revenue, and clients. That’s why it’s vital to find a web hosting service partner that matches your business’s needs.

In this post, we’ll outline some of the most significant factors you should be considering before deciding on a web hosting provider. While some of these elements are more straightforward than others, they’ll all help you get a clearer picture of what you need from your web hosting service.

Website downtime has a direct impact on revenue and advertising. If a customer tries to navigate to your site when it’s down, that may be a customer who never returns to your site again and a missed opportunity you can’t get back. With this in mind, it’s critical to find a hosting provider that administers a hands-on support experience.

Since website downtime is sometimes inevitable, you should always know exactly who to call in the event of an outage. A provider with 24/7 live chat and support is an excellent place to start. Even better? Having the direct number of a higher-up at the company who is always just a phone call away. Either way, the ideal partner will be aware that your website has gone down and already have a solution even before you realize it’s down.

Before deciding on a provider, see if any of them offer the ability to park any of your business’s other domain names. To prevent URL and search engine competition, it helps to buy a variety of domains that are similar to your company name, including .com, .net, .org, and hyphenated versions. A web hosting partner that lets you manage these alternate domains from one platform makes it easier to manage your brand and discover if you’re losing potential traffic to these URLs.

While a 100% website uptime guarantee is virtually impossible, you should be looking for a provider with an uptime guarantee of 99% or higher. Again, this minimizes the risk that website downtime will lead to missed opportunities and lost revenue. To ensure maximum uptime, inquire as to which strategies they use to prioritize redundancy. If their servers utilize multiple backup locations and mirrored servers, that’s a good sign that they’ll be able to keep your website up and running even if one server goes down.

Mistakes happen. Content can be accidentally deleted and images lost forever. That’s why it’s crucial to find a web hosting service partner that regularly backs up a recent version of your website. Daily backups are ideal, but make sure your provider has a disaster recovery plan in place to quickly get your site back to the way it was.

The right web hosting service provider should make it relatively easy to make changes to your site. At the very least, you need access to the server so you can easily create new email accounts and change server settings. You should also be able to check work emails from an online web platform when you’re away from your work computer.

Blogs have become critical for staying relevant to your customers. From setting yourself apart as an industry leader to connecting with customers, a blog makes it easier to spread your business’s messaging and services. Even if you don’t currently have a blog, make sure to find a provider that makes posting blogs easy if you decide to implement one in the future.

One of the core goals of any website should be growing your business and expanding your customer base. That’s why you need a hosting company that’s prepared to keep up with your business’s growth goals.

If you end up needing to change hosting providers for whatever reason, the right partner makes that process as seamless as possible, instead of resisting your decision. Read the fine print to be sure your new partner will help facilitate the transfer of your domain name and website to a new provider.

If you’ve been dissatisfied by web hosting services in the past, the experts at 42, Inc. are here to help. We specialize in small business web hosting solutions that maximize site uptime and ensure your website tools are always there when you need them. For everything from cloud web hosting solutions to dedicated hosting services, get in touch with our team to explore the possibilities for your website.