Factors To Consider When Choosing A Hosting Service

April 16, 2022

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With the digital space being overwhelmed with literally a website for everything, it can be tough deciding where and how to host your website. Depending on the purpose of your site, choosing a bad hosting provider can hurt your site’s functionality and potentially hurt your brand. 

In this post, we bring you a few key metrics you should investigate and consider before developing and launching a website.

Uptime

Uptime is the measurement of a site’s viewing reliability when a user visits the site. This measurement is calculated and measured by a percentage scale with the highest being 100% and the lowest being 0%; meaning the closer to 100% the uptime is, the better the chances are of your site being live. The consistently lower the uptime percentage is, the more harmful it can be to the ranking of the site as Google and search engines penalize sites due to an unreliable nature. A great uptime average is one that is above 99%. With a site’s reliability being an important factor for having a site, researching a host’s uptime percentage is a must in determining your decision for where you want to host your site.

Speed

The time it takes to render your site is an important factor that will ultimately directly affect your SEO (search engine optimization). A site’s loading speed is considered good and fast when it is able to be loaded in under 3 seconds which is the average loading time for top-ranked websites on Google. Current metrics show that 40% of users will wait no more than 3 seconds before abandoning a site.

Traffic

If you are starting a new website, it can be hard to gauge expected traffic to your site. That is why traffic is an important factor to attempt to understand as it can potentially affect your site’s uptime. Depending on the hosting plan and its limitations, a large influx of traffic can overwhelm your server’s resources and cause it to crash rendering it unavailable to users. Most hosts claim to provide unlimited hosting but unfortunately, this claim is oftentimes a marketing phrase used to sell and reel in a potential customer. It is always important to make sure that you investigate the limits hidden in the small print to understand the pain points of the plan.

Customer Service

When something goes awry, it is natural to make sure that you have the ability to easily contact customer support to help assist with identifying or resolving the problem. Good customer service is a key factor for many and how hosting providers help with a crisis can be the difference between your website being offline for a few minutes vs several hours, thus harming your site’s visibility. This is why it is highly important to investigate and familiarize yourself with the options the host provides for contacting them and requesting help.

Main Takeaways

  • Deciding on a good hosting plan can positively affect your site’s visibility while deciding on a bad hosting plan can negatively affect your site’s visibility. 
  • Always chase an uptime that is 99.01% or higher.
  • A host’s customer service response during a crisis is important.

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