Posted on October 9, 2024 by zovoteam
The Best 7 Features that Matter in a Web Hosting Provider
Whether you are launching an online business or simply wish to give life to your project, the question emerges—which web hosting service is the most suitable for my website?
There are over 330,000 web hosting companies in the world, so it is really challenging to decide which one of them is the best for your website. But don’t worry.
To make the right decision on the hosting plan that will maintain your website’s performance, we have developed a list of 7 characteristics that will assist you in choosing the right hosting provider for your website.
Uptime and Reliability
When your website is hosted on a poorly maintained or unstable server, it can cause frequent downtime. That will eventually affect your site’s trust and reliability with your customers.
Because when your visitors are going to have a bad experience due to poor hosting service, they are not going to blame the hosting server you’ve hosted your site on, they don’t even know where you’ve hosted your website. 88% of consumers seem less likely to return to a website after experiencing downtime. They would not refer that to any friends or potential clients.
Even with 99.9% uptime hosting, your website may be unavailable for 8 hours, 45 minutes, and 52 seconds per year. And a study shows that a delay in loading a website by 100 milliseconds can cause the conversion rates to decrease by 7%. A two-second delay may result in a 103% increase in bounce rates. So as the industry standard, you should consider looking for websites with 99.999% availability.
Speed and Performance
Hosting speed basically means how quickly the data is transferred from the server to the user’s device. It’s a really critical factor that influences the performance and user experience of a website. A faster hosting speed can help you maintain high engagement, better search ranking, and ensure the overall success of a website.
Most users will not wait around if your website takes too long to load. According to Backlinko, the average time for loading a website on desktop is 10.4 seconds and 27.4 seconds on mobile. A website’s hosting speed is also affected by:
Server Location: The physical location of the hosting servers can significantly affect visitors page loading speed. The closer the server is to the visitor, the faster it can load the pages, and it leads to a quicker page load speed.
Storage type: Web hosting services use two types of storage, one is hard disk drives (HDDs) and another is solid state drives (SSDs) for data storage. SDD servers can provide up to 20 times faster speed than HDDs do. So hosting a website on SSD servers can improve the overall site’s speed.
Available Resources (CPU and RAM): The right choice of proper CPU (Central Processing Unit) and RAM (Random Access Memory) on your hosting server affects directly your website’s speed. Choosing a hosting plan with more resources will enable your website to handle greater traffic without slowing your website.
Content Delivery Network (CDN): Using a CDN network can dramatically improve your hosting speed. A CDN network decreases the distance between the server and the user’s device. And optimized server infrastructure to respond to user requests more quickly.
Customer Support
Websites may face issues like downtime, security breaches, or plugin issues. So choosing web hosting with 24/7 customer support is really essential. A good hosting provider can solve any issue or query about your website and enhance your website’s operational efficiency.
Here are the things that an exceptional hosting provider offers:
24/7 Availability: a technical issue can arrive anytime on your website, so choosing a hosting service with 24/7 availability will help you get expert assistance whenever you need it.
Multiple Channels: a hosting provider should have multiple channels like phone call, message, text, or live chat to suit your preferences.
Resource Libraries: a good hosting provider has to offer useful resources to their users, like tutorials, forums, articles, or FAQs so that the users can solve the problems.
Scalability Options
As your website grows with time, you’ll need to upgrade the website resources to be able to handle the growing traffic, content, and transactions without compromising on its speed or uptime. Here are the key elements that affect a website’s scalability :
Upgrade Options: A scalable hosting solution will offer easy to upgrade hosting plans. So you can easily upgrade from shared hosting to a dedicated hosting or VPS (Virtual Private Server) for upgrading additional server resources. This is a really important feature for any website, to support its growth and expansion.
Resource Flexibility: To keep the website operational, you might need to upgrade its CPU for processing power or its RAM for handling more traffic. A flexible hosting provider will give you the flexibility to adjust its resources for meeting your website requirements.
Load Balancing: Load balancing is a process of distributing incoming website traffic into multiple servers. This process helps your website remain stable and prevents any single server from becoming overwhelmed by a great load of traffic. A scalable hosting strategy relies heavily on effective load balancing.
Auto-Scaling Feature: Auto-scaling helps your website to handle sudden spikes in traffic. It’s a system that automatically adjusts the server resources used on a website based on its current demand. and helps the website remain available and perform when, even in sudden traffic spikes.
Web Hosting Security Features
Security is a high priority when choosing hosting for your website. A hosting provider protects your websites for cyber threats like hacking, malware, data breaches, or DDoS attacks.
You should choose a hosting company with safe servers that maintain confidentiality and availability of your website data.
Web Hosting Security Features to Look for:
SSL Certificates: SSL Certificates keep the data between the user’s browser and web server encrypted. This makes it hard for the hackers to intercept and steal data. You should look for the web hosting plans that offer SSL certificates with them.
Web application firewalls (WAF): Web application firewalls protect against malicious traffic and block common security threats.
DDoS Protection: Protection against Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks makes sure that the website is accessible even when massive traffic spikes are designed to take it down.
Backups & Recovery: Regular, automatic backups protect against data loss in case of a security breach or accidental deletion.
Network Monitoring: Continuous network monitoring is important to identify suspicious activity and potential security threats in real-time. A web host that actively monitors its network can prevent attacks before they happen.
Access Controls: Features such as two-factor authentication (2FA) and secure FTP (SFTP) restrict access to the website’s backend and prevent unwanted changes.
Backup and Data Recovery
Backups and data recovery are really important for websites. If your website crashes for any reason and you can not back up your data—you lose your website, your previous achievements and high website performance metrics become irrelevant. A study has shown that 68% of businesses that experience a data loss will go out of business within a year and 93% within five years. So choosing a hosting with daily backup and data recovery is really crucial.
Here’s what you should look for in backup options:
Frequency: daily backups decrease the chances of data loss, some hosting services even offer real-time backups, with the change that’s happening to your website.
Ease of restoration: when you are in a crisis, you would want to restore your website as quickly as possible. Consider hosting services with a simple restoration process that requires only a few clicks. A good hosting provider should restore your website with minimal loss and provide frequent backups.
Storage location: it’s safest to store backups in multiple sites , live hostever provider. We provide 2 backups, one for regular backup and one for natural crisis backup. So that your backups remain unaffected even when your server faces issues.
Automatic and manual options: Automatic backups can save a regular copy of your website without your intervention. However, you should also be able to create manual backups, for example, when you need to make significant changes to your site.
Pricing
Cost should not be the only factor when you are looking for a good hosting service for your website. But a good hosting provider will have the right balance between cost effectiveness and necessary resources to support website needs.
Keep these tips in mind while looking for the right web hosting plan:
There are various types of hosting plans, and the price will vary based on the plan you select for your website. For example, shared hosting is the cheapest hosting package, whereas dedicated hosting is the most expensive.
You need to pay attention to the hosting’s actual plan in the promo price, because after one year, when you need to renew the hosting plan, the fee will add up.
Review what’s included in a free plan, for example, a free SSL is the obvious one that’s added with most of the hosting plans.
Check if the company provides a money back guarantee.
Final Thoughts
Choosing the right hosting plan will impact the overall speed and performance of your website, so before signing up for a hosting site, take your time, look for the features you need and find a reliable provider that offers it all. This will save you from a lot of troubles in the long run.
If you are looking for a hosting provider that cares about your business, sign up for the Hostever hosting plan today.
FAQ:
What are the most important qualities of a good web host?
The best website hosting providers like Hostever offer speedy performance, reliable uptime, scalable options, and great security features like free SSL certificates and malware protection with responsive customer support.
How does a web hosting provider ensure high uptime?
A web hosting provider ensures high uptime through reliable hardware, constant monitoring, and a redundant network configuration. Hostings like Hostever are known for their 99.9% uptime guarantee with expansion.
What security features are necessary to protect my website?
Security features like DDoS Protection, Backups & Recovery, Network Monitoring, and SSL certificates are critical for protecting your website and recovering from any data loss.
Can I begin with a basic hosting plan and upgrade later?
Yes, with hostever hosting plans, you can start with a basic plan and then upgrade later when you need to. We offer various hosting plans, and you can choose the right hosting plan that fits your website needs.
How does web hosting backup and restore work?
Backup and restore services work by saving your website data on different servers. So if any problem occurs on your website, you can easily backup and restore your website from the copies that are saved on the server.