Important Things A Web Hosting Plan Must Have For A Business Website

Important Things A Web Hosting Plan Must Have For A Business Website
It's important for you as a business owner to make sure that your business website is available
to your audiences across different geographic locations at any given time. For this, you need to
choose a web host that will meet this requirement. This article discusses important things a web
hosting plan for a business website should have.
Uptime reliability and availability
Uptime of your website is important. Your audiences visit your website at any point of time. It's
important for the web host to make sure that uptime of your website is intact. If your site faces
downtime often because of performance issues, it could lead to failure of your website to be
accessible to your audiences. You should make sure that downtime of your website is minimal.
Technical support
This is important because as a business owner, you might not have the professional expertise.
You need to depend on the technical support personnel provided by the web host. Having
professionals, the web host is likely to give you tech support via telephone, email, chatting and
so on. The personnel should be technically competent.
Customer support
Further, they should be ready to serve around the clock. They should be prompt to address
issues confronting customers. They should use email, SMS, telephone calls to promptly address
these issues.
Consider technologies the host offers
As your business grows, the number of transactions increases and they will become more
complex. Therefore, a web host plan for your business should offer technologies such as PHP
and My SQL. These technologies enable you to operate a blog or use a content management
system (CMS) in the website.
Further, if you need SSL certification installation, your web host should be helpful and
technically competent.
Page load time
Page load time is important. Pages that load slowly are likely to frustrate your audiences and
drive them away to your competitors.
Bandwidth
Bandwidth measures the data transferred from a site. How much bandwidth is suitable for your
site is hard to determine – it depends on the design of the site, and the number of visitors that
are expected to come. As your business grows, the number of visitors and the number of pages
of the site is likely to increase. Consequently, you need to purchase additional bandwidth. The
web host plan should have the flexibility to handle the increase in bandwidth.
Disk space
The smaller and simpler your site is the less disk space it needs. In other words, the demand for
disk space keeps on growing with the increased size and sophistication in your website.
Considering the number of pages in your site, the number those you are planning to add and
number of visitors per month, you can judge the disk space you need for your site.
Check whether the size of disk space offered is part of the web hosting plan. And, the plan
should allow for expansion of bandwidth when required.
Choose shared or VPS hosting
Shared hosting is inexpensive. It is suitable for websites that are plain and have low traffic.
Whereas VPS hosting is suitable for sites that have large volume of traffic. VPS hosting enables
customized firewall, SSH access and dedicated IPS addresses. As your business website becomes
sophisticated, it's likely to need these features to handle the new challenges. Your web host plan
should enable you upgrading to avail these features.
Thus, the web host plan should enable the business owner to choose shared or VPS web hosting
and should allow you to switch to dedicated hosting when they want so to do.
Consider scalability options as your business grows
Ensure to check whether the web host's plan fits into your business plans in the years to come.
The hosting plan that looks good today might not be able to meet the new needs of your
business in the following few say, three years because of rise of traffic volume, number pages,
etc. The web host you are considering should accommodate these changes and should make the
website function smoothly.
Check for security, backup and recovery
The web host should be able to address security issues. They should have the necessary fire wall
to protect their server. They should be able to combat viruses, malware, worms and any other
applications that are detrimental to clients' servers.
Back-up and recovery
The web host's plan should include backing up the data of clients. Should any undesirable
situation happen that deletes the data, the back-up facility would help restore the lost data. This
will allow your site to resume.
With increasing popularity of communication technology, and the advent of smartphones and
other mobile devices, the importance of being online for your business cannot be exaggerated.
Business owners should take adequate caution while choosing web hosting for their business
websites. Following the points just discussed would help take an optimal decision.
It's important for you as a business owner to make sure that your business website is available
to your audiences across different geographic locations at any given time. For this, you need to
choose a web host that will meet this requirement. This article discusses important things a web
hosting plan for a business website should have.
Uptime reliability and availability
Uptime of your website is important. Your audiences visit your website at any point of time. It's
important for the web host to make sure that uptime of your website is intact. If your site faces
downtime often because of performance issues, it could lead to failure of your website to be
accessible to your audiences. You should make sure that downtime of your website is minimal.
Technical support
This is important because as a business owner, you might not have the professional expertise.
You need to depend on the technical support personnel provided by the web host. Having
professionals, the web host is likely to give you tech support via telephone, email, chatting and
so on. The personnel should be technically competent.
Customer support
Further, they should be ready to serve around the clock. They should be prompt to address
issues confronting customers. They should use email, SMS, telephone calls to promptly address
these issues.
Consider technologies the host offers
As your business grows, the number of transactions increases and they will become more
complex. Therefore, a web host plan for your business should offer technologies such as PHP
and My SQL. These technologies enable you to operate a blog or use a content management
system (CMS) in the website.
Further, if you need SSL certification installation, your web host should be helpful and
technically competent.
Page load time
Page load time is important. Pages that load slowly are likely to frustrate your audiences and
drive them away to your competitors.
Bandwidth
Bandwidth measures the data transferred from a site. How much bandwidth is suitable for your
site is hard to determine – it depends on the design of the site, and the number of visitors that
are expected to come. As your business grows, the number of visitors and the number of pages
of the site is likely to increase. Consequently, you need to purchase additional bandwidth. The
web host plan should have the flexibility to handle the increase in bandwidth.
Disk space
The smaller and simpler your site is the less disk space it needs. In other words, the demand for
disk space keeps on growing with the increased size and sophistication in your website.
Considering the number of pages in your site, the number those you are planning to a dd and
number of visitors per month, you can judge the disk space you need for your site.
Check whether the size of disk space offered is part of the web hosting plan. And, the plan
should allow for expansion of bandwidth when required.
Choose shared or VPS hosting
Shared hosting is inexpensive. It is suitable for websites that are plain and have low traffic.
Whereas VPS hosting is suitable for sites that have large volume of traffic. VPS hosting enables
customized firewall, SSH access and dedicated IPS addresses. As your business website becomes
sophisticated, it's likely to need these features to handle the new challenges. Your web host plan
should enable you upgrading to avail these features.
Thus, the web host plan should enable the business owner to choose shared or VPS web hosting
and should allow you to switch to dedicated hosting when they want so to do.
Consider scalability options as your business grows
Ensure to check whether the web host's plan fits into your business plans in the years to come.
The hosting plan that looks good today might not be able to meet the new needs of your
business in the following few say, three years because of rise of traffic volume, number pages,
etc. The web host you are considering should accommodate these changes and should make the
website function smoothly.
Check for security, backup and recovery
The web host should be able to address security issues. They should have the necessary fire wall
to protect their server. They should be able to combat viruses, malware, worms and any other
applications that are detrimental to clients' servers.
Back-up and recovery
The web host's plan should include backing up the data of clients. Should any undesirable
situation happen that deletes the data, the back-up facility would help restore the lost data. This
will allow your site to resume.
With increasing popularity of communication technology, and the advent of smartphones and
other mobile devices, the importance of being online for your business cannot be exaggerated.
Business owners should take adequate caution while choosing web hosting for their business
websites. Following the points just discussed would help take an optimal decision.
A dedicated IP address is advantageous for your business website. It keeps the data of your
business and customers secure, builds trust and boosts your online image. However, it's costlier.
Decide whether you need a dedicated IP address based on the points discussed in this article.
Things To Consider While Choosing A Web Host For Your E-commerce Website
As the owner of an e-commerce website, you need to consider the interests of diverse groups
such as your customers, vendors, visitors, etc. along with your business's interests. It is
important to keep the data of your customers as well as your business secure besides
maintaining optimal amount of uptime with user friendly web pages. For this all, you should
choose a web host that can do all these tasks for you.
In this article, we will discuss things that you need to consider while choosing a web host for
your e-commerce website.
Mandatory SSL
Ensure to check whether the web host is licensed to provide SSL certification. This is important
because when shopping on your site, customers use personal credentials such as credit card
numbers, user-ids, passwords, etc., and this information has to be kept secure to make sure
they are not accessible to unauthorized third parties.
Uptime of the e-commerce website
A few seconds of downtime can cause huge loss. Your website should be available to your
audience around the clock seven days a week. Therefore, make sure to hire a web host that can
create maximum uptime and able to manage traffic at peak times. If you are not sure on how
much traffic your site handles, ensure to fix the issue accordingly with the web host.
Good database support for managing data
Today's websites deal primarily with dynamic content for which a database is required. The
type of database you should choose depends on the CMS you are using.
For example, if you are using WordPress, it needs MySQL 5.5 or greater. Check whether the
web host offers features that are compatible with database support. Choose one that you can
handle easily.
Shopping cart support
The shopping cart is the feature on your e-commerce site where customers choose
products/services that you sell and they can also use it as a tool to track their shopping
activities. The web host should support the technical requirement for operating the shopping
cart. In addition, check for the technical support they are offering for shopping cart.
Dedicated or shared hosting?
*Shared hosting might be good in the beginning, but as your business grows in terms of
number of visitors, multiple features in the site, etc., sometimes shared hosting fails to meet the
standards.
*Dedicated web hosting will allow your site for higher scalability and cross-platform
accessibility of the services.
*Dedicated hosting allows you to upgrade the features of your server like
OS/libraries/plugins/etc. Whereas you may have to rely on the hosting company for the same
when you have a shared server.
Disk space and sufficient bandwidth
*Your e-commerce site is likely to have a large number of pages and images to present
products/services effectively. For this, more disk space is needed. Estimate your amount of disk
space requirement today, and the probable requirement in future. Choose a hosting plan
accordingly.
*As for bandwidth, make sure to take a bandwidth higher than your current requirement. This
will help you when there is unexpected large monthly increase in traffic. On the other hand, if
the bandwidth is not enough, your site might crash, which could lead to loss of potential
customers and business and damage to your reputation.
Quality customer support
Check for the quality of customer service the service provider offers. This is essential as they
will help you fix issues with respect to technical aspects of hosting and enable your ecommerce website to work round the clock without any downtime.
Considering these points when choosing a web host for your e-commerce site will be beneficial
for your customers as well as to your business.
Choosing a proper TLD is as important as choosing a domain name. However, many people do
not give enough importance to TLDs without knowing that it can make a difference in their
online marketing efforts. In this article, we're discussing gTLDs vs ccTLDs and the importance
of choosing the appropriate one for your website.
gTLD
A generic top-level domain, commonly referred to as gTLD is one that is not tied to any specific
country and is generic. Examples of gTLDs are .com, .gov, .net, .org, etc. Of these, .com is the
most popularly used gTLD - nearly 50% of websites use .com followed by .org and .net. These
TLDs are not targeted to a specific geographic area and they are applicable to any location.
There are multiple advantages and disadvantages of using gTLDs. Here is the list:
Advantages
With generic TLDs, your website can get traffic from multiple geographic locations a nd proper
optimization ensures good/better global search engine rankings and helps attract visitors.
Many search engines trust the websites that have .com and .org, as their domain extensions.
Thus, a gTLD is likely to help in improving search engine rankings of a website.
Disadvantages
If the primary goal of your website is to gain the local audience, a ccTLD is likely to be more
helpful – because, the local audience prefers local ccTLDs to gTLDs.
ccTLD
ccTLD stands for country code top level domain. A ccTLD is aimed to indicate a country specific
or country code TLD. TLDs are domain extensions specific to a particular country. In general,
these are two letter TLDs like .ca, .us, .uk, etc. These are useful if your targeted audience are
from a specific country. This also brings organic traffic to your website by improving search
engine rankings in the country based search engine results.
Following are advantages and disadvantages of using ccTLDs:
Advantages
People mainly use ccTLDs for targeting the local audience and to bring traffic to the websites.
People tend to click websites with local domain extension, as they feel that they are more trust
worthy than the other domains. This increases the credibility and helps in easy branding of the
website.
Disadvantages
If you are planning to reach out/take your website to global audience, a ccTLD does not offer
flexibility. gTLDs are more favored both among global audience as well as search engines.
By default, many people try to go for gTLD, while purchasing a domain. ccTLDs are considered
only when the domain name with a gTLD that has already been purchased by someone else, or
their website exclusively serves their respective audience in the geography. However, when
you are choosing a TLD, it is recommended to make a choice from the perspective of your
online marketing strategy.
As the owner of an e-commerce website, you need to consider the interests of diverse groups
such as your customers, vendors, visitors, etc. along with your business's interests. It is
important to keep the data of your customers as well as your business secure besides
maintaining optimal amount of uptime with user friendly web pages. For this all, you should
choose a web host that can do all these tasks for you.
In this article, we will discuss things that you need to consider while choosing a web host for
your e-commerce website.
Mandatory SSL
Ensure to check whether the web host is licensed to provide SSL certification. This is important
because when shopping on your site, customers use personal credentials such as credit card
numbers, user-ids, passwords, etc., and this information has to be kept secure to make sure
they are not accessible to unauthorized third parties.
Uptime of the e-commerce website
A few seconds of downtime can cause huge loss. Your website should be available to your
audience around the clock seven days a week. Therefore, make sure to hire a web host that can
create maximum uptime and able to manage traffic at peak times. If you are not sure on how
much traffic your site handles, ensure to fix the issue accordingly with the web host.
Good database support for managing data
Today's websites deal primarily with dynamic content for which a database is required. The
type of database you should choose depends on the CMS you are using.
For example, if you are using WordPress, it needs MySQL 5.5 or greater. Check whether the
web host offers features that are compatible with database support. Choose one that you can
handle easily.
Shopping cart support
The shopping cart is the feature on your e-commerce site where customers choose
products/services that you sell and they can also use it as a tool to track their shopping
activities. The web host should support the technical requirement for operating the shopping
cart. In addition, check for the technical support they are offering for shopping cart.
Dedicated or shared hosting?
*Shared hosting might be good in the beginning, but as your business grows in terms of
number of visitors, multiple features in the site, etc., sometimes shared hosting fails to meet the
standards.
*Dedicated web hosting will allow your site for higher scalability and cross-platform
accessibility of the services.
*Dedicated hosting allows you to upgrade the features of your server like
OS/libraries/plugins/etc. Whereas you may have to rely on the hosting company for the same
when you have a shared server.
Disk space and sufficient bandwidth
*Your e-commerce site is likely to have a large number of pages and images to present
products/services effectively. For this, more disk space is needed. Estimate your amount of disk
space requirement today, and the probable requirement in future. Choose a hosting plan
accordingly.
*As for bandwidth, make sure to take a bandwidth higher than your current requirement. This
will help you when there is unexpected large monthly increase in traffic. On the other hand, if
the bandwidth is not enough, your site might crash, which could lead to loss of potential
customers and business and damage to your reputation.
Quality customer support
Check for the quality of customer service the service provider offers. This is essential as they
will help you fix issues with respect to technical aspects of hosting and enable your ecommerce website to work round the clock without any downtime.
Considering these points when choosing a web host for your e-commerce site will be beneficial
for your customers as well as to your business
4GoodHosting
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