Getting the Most From Your Web Hosting Company
Your web hosting company represents one of the most important parts of your business, whether it includes a storefront of the brick-and-mortar variety, or if it’s merely a digital operation. Either way, you’ll need secure web hosting that makes your website easy to access and navigate for any of your customers.
To that end, there are quite a few considerations worth exploring. This writing will cover three primary things you need to take into account if you’re going to find the best web hosting. While there are more things to think about than just these three items, they represent central points of consideration from which other aspects of vetting will develop.
1. Bandwidth Allowance
The higher your bandwidth, which represents maximum allowable transferable data on your site, the more traffic a given website can sustain. Your hosting company should have realistic baseline bandwidth provisions which are bracketed in affordable rates of expansion. Ideally, your website should continue to require just a little bit more bandwidth on a continuing basis.
If you’re gradually growing year over year, you’ll gradually get more traffic. So you need, firstly, the bandwidth that will cover immediate needs when you start using a web hosting provider. Secondly, you need bandwidth upgrade costs that are representative of your situation. That is to say: you shouldn’t have to pay twice the previous price to increase bandwidth.
2. Security
Security is a big deal when it comes to web hosting. If you’ve got bad security, your business could get hacked, and you could be culpable for damages in court. A poor web hosting provider could have massive vulnerabilities for which you’re ultimately on the line. Every state in America has breach notification laws, and they tend to differ slightly.
So say you run an all-digital booking agency that makes it possible for travelers to get a discount on a hotel by using your service. Naturally, they have to enter their credit card number on the site in order to reserve the booking. Now say your primary site is run through a chintzy web hosting company, and they get hacked.
Suddenly all the data you sent or received is up for grabs, and that includes your customers’ information. Now you’re on the hook for fines for hundreds of thousands of dollars owing to your data breach. Even if you properly notify those who your business serves, there may well be some collateral damages for which the law holds you responsible.
An ideal web hosting provider will have adequate security. This means every couple of months, they’ll upgrade their defenses. Technology is a “moving target” because it’s always being expanded upon in terms of innovations or breakthroughs, so there will always be new “threats” that require some sort of upgrade in security. The right web hosting company will have a practice of continually renewing security.
Uptime
Uptime is the opposite of downtime. All digital companies have both. Downtime is when operations go down for one reason or another—security, user error, or external attack are common reasons for downtime.
Uptime is how much time a company spends operating. Uptime should always be greater than downtime, but that’s not enough. When choosing a web hosting provider, get their uptime statistics, and measure it against the uptime statistics of other similar web hosting providers.
The one with the most uptime will likely have fewer security issues and more efficiently manage the bandwidth of its customers. Losses in bandwidth and security will often result in downtime. High uptime can indicate a diminution of such issues.
Finding A Web Hosting Company That’s Reliable
This is one of the best VPS company options out there; you’ll get bandwidth, security, and uptime. Not all web hosting options will provide VPS solutions; though there is a lot of crossovers. Regardless, the three primary things you’ll want to think about include the bandwidth you’re allowed, associated security, and associated “uptime”.
With proper bandwidth, security, and a guarantee of reliability through uptime stats, you’ll be able to maximize operational efficiency for all your web hosting applications. You’ll be able to run the software you need securely, swiftly, and without the worry of losing information or traffic for lack of bandwidth.
