Choosing the best hosting provider for your brand-new website can be a very tiresome process, that is, if you want to do it the right way. The list of services that are included in hosting plans go on forever, and often there are just a few that you recognize as important for you. But what about the rest, and what are the things you might miss, without knowing the real benefits they might bring.
First and foremost, the performance and stability of your new website are of the utmost importance. You want your website to run fast and be available at any time. This is why you should look for providers that have powerful servers and guarantee a lot of nines after 99% of uptime. Of course, don’t settle for anything less than superb 24/7 support, and easy-to-use interface that allows you to have a clear overview of all your hosting options, and website performance. Something like plans offered by Hostinger that cover most of the basics needs and a lot more.
But what about the rest?
With a plethora of options available in web hosting plans, there are hidden ones that you might find very useful, and that can strongly impact the most important aspects of your website.
Free domain
With many hosting providers some options like free domain registration and SSL support come as standard and are often taken for granted. With free domain registration, you are taking one item off your expenses list, and the overall cost of hosting can be much cheaper if you can avoid paying for domain registration. Of course, make sure those domains are top-level and cover .com .net .online .website and other TLDs instead of some free custom subdomains that are not recommended for business use.
Advanced security
On the other hand, improving security is never a bad thing. With plans that offer an SSL certificate as a part of a hosting plan, an additional encryption layer for your data flow is a good way of telling your visitors that communication with your website is secured. You should also keep in mind that an SSL certificate means that your website will have better rankings on search engine result pages.
One of the things you also might find among the offerings in your hosting plan is Cloudflare DDoS protection. Cloudflare has a layered security approach that can defend your website from DDoS attacks on many levels. Once active, Cloudflare can prevent disruptions caused by bad traffic, while allowing good traffic through, keeping your website on top of its game.
Location and server neighbors
If you are running an eCommerce online shop, the location of servers containing your website can be a very important factor for the speed and latency of your visitors. This has a significant impact on websites that require often access to the database. Many hosting providers allow you to choose server locations closer to your target audience and have tools that can help you better determine the optimal location. This way your visitors will access data on servers closer to them, thus eliminating latency caused by distant servers, and improving overall performance and experience.
The server neighborhood on shared hosting could become an issue if other websites hosted on the same server require more resources, leaving you with sluggish performance. Spikes in visitor count can impact resources like bandwidth, CPU time, available memory, and even storage space. One other thing with shared hosting is that you often share the same IP as your neighbors, which can be problematic if your neighbors are offering some shady services on their website.
This and similar possible problems are the reasons you should pick a provider with flexible options when it comes to upgrading and changing your current hosting plans.
Simple WordPress
With most of the websites in the world running on WordPress, the chance is that your shiny new website is also using this popular CMS platform. Hosting providers often have specialized offers for WordPress hosting that users can have greater benefit from. This can come in handy for not so experienced users that can avoid hiring experts for setting up their website. Options like 1-click WordPress install are becoming more and more popular and often cover additional optimization for your website, as opposed to step-by-step installations. Even if you are not satisfied with your current provider, look for a hosting provider that offers easy-to-use migration tools for the WordPress website. Some of them go even further, offering free of charge migration orchestrated by specialists that are making sure everything goes buttery smooth.
Suit-up your e-mail
Using free mail clients like Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook for your business is never a good idea. When making your first contact, your email tells a lot about you. It is not the same if you send a business email from [email protected] and from [email protected]. Simply speaking, most businesses get hundreds of emails every day, and what do you think the first filter for those emails is?
In business, using free email clients can be misleading, and can raise unnecessary questions like: “What can we expect from them, if they can’t afford a domain email, or even worse, are they that lazy to change it” or “Can we even trust someone with @gmail account?”. Therefore you should take advantage of hosting plans that cover domain email, and simply improve your online business image.
And a lot more
The list goes on and covers features like unlimited bandwidth, daily backups, DNS management, unlimited FTP accounts, SSH access, unlimited MySQL databases, and even dedicated resources and IP address, depending on the type of hosting you choose. With all these options your perfect hosting provider should have easy setup, provide fast and available servers, have great WordPress experience, professional support, and be flexible so that you can adjust your plans according to your needs.
One of the features that can be very useful is a test period, something like 15 or 30 days of the free trial so that you can try and see if everything they say is true.
Overlook can cost you later on
In the sea of different hosting providers with different plans and different options for most of them, you are bound to get a headache even if you take a glance at them while searching for the right one. As we said at the beginning, don’t settle for anything less than great performance, uptime, advanced security, and professional support. Other options are a plus but bear in mind that by choosing the right provider, you can save a lot of money by covering useful features through your plan instead of paying for them later on.
