Launching a website that’s destined for success is about more than just designing something eye-catching and loading it with engaging and valuable content. There are plenty of boxes to tick, but one of the fundamental things you should be looking at is choosing the right website hosting provider.
Let’s be honest—web hosts are a dime a dozen. SiteGround, iPower, A2 Hosting, GoDaddy, Hostinger… The list goes on, and on the surface, they all look pretty similar.
So which one should you choose? Here are 5 steps to successful web hosting so you can be sure to start your website off with a strong foundation.
Understand Your Website’s Requirements
You can’t figure out if a web host meets your needs if you don’t know what your website’s needs are! So here’s what you should be considering to match your site to a host that can give you what you need.
Type of Website You Have
What type of site is yours? This is the first step towards understanding what your website is going to need to be able to run smoothly at all times.
A blog will need vastly different resources to an e-commerce store, for example. In most cases, a simple blog can easily hang out on a shared server without any negative consequences, but don’t even consider putting your e-commerce store on a server that’s also holding other websites… Or you can say goodbye to sales!
Expected Traffic Volume
It’s hard to tell what kind of traffic your site might be getting in the future. But you can make an educated guess here—if you’re starting a personal blog about your travels, it might be a pretty chilled kind of site.
On the other hand, if you’re setting up a new business that’s intended to bring in a full-time income, you’re going to be expecting a fairly constant flow. Higher-traffic sites are going to need more robust hosting with dedicated resources that can handle a lot of visitors.
Storage Needs
How resource-heavy is your site? If you’ve got a fancy design, a ton of pictures, and large files that need to be stored in the memory, you’ll need a host that offers a good bit of storage. Or, you can opt for a web host that uses a CDN—content delivery network—which hosts all those sizable files on an external server.
Software and Technology
Some hosting providers specialize in certain tech, like WordPress hosting or Drupal. You might not need anything fancy at all, but make sure the software your chosen host is using is modern and not outdated.
Research and Compare Hosting Providers
Once you know what you need, you can figure out which hosting providers tick all your boxes. Consider these factors to find the right ones.
Type of Hosting
Shared, VPS, dedicated, cloud? Shared is the cheapest and least reliable, and cloud is the opposite end of the spectrum. We recommend dedicated or cloud, which gives your website all its resources so nothing has to be shared.
Uptime and Reliability
There’s no excuse these days for an uptime of less than 99.9%, although the gold standard is now 99.99%. Don’t settle for less—it could be the difference between 1 minute of downtime and 12 to 14 minutes of downtime!
Scalability
Look for providers that can grow with you. If you’re planning on bringing in more business, selling more products, and generally growing the size of your business, make sure you’re using a host who allows you to do that without throttling your progress.
Security Features
Nobody wants to be hacked, so choose a host that has excellent security features. Double-check exactly what they offer before signing up with anyone!
Customer Support
Customer support needs to be available 24/7, whether by phone, email, or chat. There’s no excuse for poor customer support, and you don’t want to have an issue and have to wait hours for it to be fixed.
Set Up and Configure Your Hosting Account
Once you’ve chosen the perfect web host for your business, sign up and set up your hosting account. You’ll most likely have to provide some info on what kind of website you’re creating so they can make recommendations.
Set Up, Customize, and Optimize Your Website
Now’s the time to design a beautiful website! Many hosts will have a website builder included, which makes it simple to create eye-catching, user-friendly sites in a fairly fast time. This step includes:
Website Development: This begins with a website builder (content management system), or you can build a site yourself if you have coding skills.
Design & Content: Spend some time picking a theme, creating an attractive website, and populating it with relevant content. Remember to SEO it!
Performance Optimization: Compress your images, install plugins, use a CDN or external video host, and get rid of anything unnecessary.
Security: Get your security measures down, like passwords and security plugins, and set up automatic backups and updates.
Monitor Your Website’s Performance
Once your site is published and available to the world, all that remains is to monitor it and keep putting out content if that’s what your site needs. We recommend using a monitoring tool and checking as often as possible, so you can get a well-rounded view of what’s happening on your site.
Checking often also means you can get a quick handle on any potential problems, see how your content is performing, and generally just stay on top of things.
Conclusion
Successful web hosting doesn’t begin with the web host. It starts with you and your choices. Take the time to research web hosting providers, compare them, and figure out which ones tick all the boxes that you need.
Fail to do so, and you might find yourself with an inadequate web host and a poorly performing site as a result! But spend some time getting it right, and you’ll be building your business on a solid foundation.
About the Author
Paul Wheeler runs a web design agency that helps small businesses optimize their websites for business success. He aims to educate business owners on all things website-related at his own website, Reviews for Website Hosting.