5 Factors You Need To Consider Before Choosing a Web Host

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Starting an online venture has several important steps to consider but one of the most important is where to host it. The right web hosting provider can mean the difference between informed, happy customers and irate buyers or even an audience that doesn't know you exist. For most small businesses and startups, the problem is knowing what to look for before settling on the hoster that's right for you.

To help, we've broken out five of the most important features you should consider when looking for your website's home.

Get The Right Hosting Service

It sounds like an obvious consideration, but not all hosting services are created equal even depending on your high-level needs. For example, if you anticipate your traffic needs to be low and stay that way for the foreseeable future, then you'll want to look at shared web hosting or VPS hosting options. On the other hand, if you're anticipating a large flock of customers on a steady basis, a dedicated hosting solution or one of the larger cloud players mentioned above is your better bet.

Since you'll probably hire internal IT staff to monitor your website, make sure you've chosen a hoster that can work with the monitoring tools those folks want to use. And if your website is your business's main resource, you might also want to host other parts of your business there, like your company's email service or your digital marketing tools.

The latter is especially useful if you don't want to go out of house on important commerce elements, such as search engine optimization (SEO) or customized marketing analytics. That all sounds much too complex if you're just starting out, but you'll grow into those needs much faster than you think, so at least plan for them at the outset.

Check Up on Reliability

Uptime is the stat you're looking for when you want to know how reliable your hosting partner is. Services without good uptime numbers can leave you hanging when you're hit with large traffic surges. For example, even smaller online merchants can experience a traffic boost during Black Friday or the December holiday rush. If your customers get a 404 error because your hoster can't handle the sudden load, you're losing revenue with no recourse.

To get a handle on uptime for potential partners, do some research on websites such as Cloud Spectator and Review Signal, which publish metrics on uptime and reliability for a long list of web hosting providers. Then get in touch with other users. Many web hosters have support forums where you can start. Questions? Hit small business groups, like LinkedIn for Small Business or Reddit's r/webhosting, r/ecommerce, and r/smallbusiness groups. These days every business needs a website so the members of these groups should have good opinions on which hosters have done the best for them.

Don't Be Afraid of A Little Complexity

Smaller businesses or startups that maybe don't have a brainy IT guy on the payroll tend to shy away from complex web hosting services like Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Microsoft Azure. That's because these are public cloud infrastructure providers, which means they'll definitely have a whole lot of web server muscle and reliability figures, but you're on your own for setting it all up. Or are you?

Both these services and others like them, such as Google Cloud and Rackspace, have very long lists of value-add partners. And wouldn't you know it, many of those partners specialize in getting small businesses up and running with some seriously robust web serving infrastructure.

The advantages here revolve around advanced capabilities like redundant reliability and security. Web hosters that specialize in servicing small businesses directly might have some of these benefits, too, but with a large public cloud player, you get much more flexibility. For example, you can make sure you've got a redundant web server running in case your primary suddenly experiences a traffic spike or simply crashes; but with a larger player, you can also decide where that redundant server lives geographically. AWS, Google, and Microsoft all have dozens of data centers around the globe so you can specify where you want your servers and match that to your most popular audience demographics.

Large, dedicated hosting services, like GoDaddy or HostGator, will have some of these options, too, but they'll be much more limited than what you can do inside the larger clouds. Yes, you'll need to engage with a value-add partner, like Antian for AWS or Connectria for Microsoft Azure, but depending on your expected traffic loads and what you want your customers to do on your site, the extra flexibility may well be worth it. And engaging with one of these partners also means you'll have a support contact that'll be much more responsive than calling the all-up Azure helpline.

Top Small Business Web Hosting Providers

Check out our roundup coverng small business web hosting providers for more reviews of the top SMB hosting services.

Hostwinds Web Hosting Review

4.0

Excellent

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AccuWeb Hosting Review

4.0

Excellent

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DreamHost Web Hosting Review

4.0

Excellent

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Matching Business Needs to Hosting Features

One area where a dedicated web hosting provider might beat out a vast public cloud is with their small business package. Bluehost, GoDaddy, and similar providers have dedicated service packages for small business customers often breaking them out into e-commerce or general-purpose sites. The advantage to these services is that they roll up all the necessary components at a single price. So an e-commerce package might include an online catalog, a shopping cart, a payment processor, and even a dashboard with metrics specific to what online merchants need.

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