Ideally, you’re looking for a long-term business relationship when you decide on a web hosting company to power your website. Therefore, making sure that the web host meets your needs is an absolute necessity; otherwise, you may find yourself jumping ship before you know it. To make your task easier, we’ve prepared a list of 6 questions you should be asking your web host before making the final decision:
1. Is the customer support responsive?
When it comes to hosting, customer support that responds in a timely manner is everything. Even though you may be an experienced webmaster, things can go wrong in the middle of the night, and when that happens, it’s imperative that the customer support resolves the issue as soon as possible. A single minute of downtime could very well be the difference between gaining or losing a high-profile customer, which is something that you can’t afford as a business owner – ever.
2. What is your backup policy?
While requesting backups every single hour is probably overdoing it, you should at least make sure the web host makes an automatic backup every day (note that some of them may charge you extra for the service). That way, you can simply restore your website to the previous version if malware messes things up or if you’d like to restore it for any other reason.
3. How many websites are on the same shared hosting plan?
Shared hosting is a cost-effective way to get your feet wet in the world of web development, but as you might have guessed, it does come with its own set of drawbacks. Generally speaking, you can expect your website to perform much worse if the server is overloaded.
4. What kind of uptime can I expect?
Nowadays, anything less than 99% uptime is considered a no-no. Since you never know when an important potential customer may visit your website, you should strive for it to be available at all times.
5. Will I get locked into a contract?
If you aren’t quite sure how long your business will stick around, don’t get locked in a 1-year-plus contract. Try to look for a web hosting provider that allows for monthly billing and doesn’t enforce a contractual relationship, so you can get out at any time if the need arises.
6. Does the hosting come with one-click-install scripts?
If you’re not particularly tech-savvy or don’t have a developer on board, one-click-install scripts can truly make life much easier. They work by asking you for some basic variables such as the installation path and the blog name (if you were to install a WordPress blog, for example), and everything else gets handled by the installer script.
Conclusion
Picking the right host as well as the correct hosting package for your needs may be one of the most important business decisions you can make, especially if the majority of it is being run online. Whenever in doubt, check the provider’s customer reviews and social media pages to get an in-depth look at how they treat their customers and see how reliable they are.
Founder Dinis Guarda
IntelligentHQ Your New Business Network.
IntelligentHQ is a Business network and an expert source for finance, capital markets and intelligence for thousands of global business professionals, startups, and companies.
We exist at the point of intersection between technology, social media, finance and innovation.
IntelligentHQ leverages innovation and scale of social digital technology, analytics, news and distribution to create an unparalleled, full digital medium and social business network spectrum.
IntelligentHQ is working hard, to become a trusted, and indispensable source of business news and analytics, within financial services and its associated supply chains and ecosystems.
