In this internet era, people often use search engines to get answers to their questions. And when they do, they are directed to websites with the information they seek. Some of these websites are owned by businesses using the internet for brand awareness and advertising.
Therefore, it’s correct to say that websites are the first interactive medium between businesses and their potential clients. Before anyone contacts your business today, they would have checked your websites. They would likely reach out through your website.
It shows that a website is integral to business marketing strategy in this digitalized era. However, a website is more or less useless when hosted by the wrong company. The performance of a website is often determined by its hosting platform. Your website is like a house in an estate. The estate is your hosting platform. Imagine living in an estate that lacks basic amenities like water and electricity. You will probably have fewer friends and visitors coming around.
For this reason, choosing the most suitable hosting platform for your website is crucial. This article will open your eyes to the essential features to look for when researching a hosting company for your business website. Make sure you read to the end and choose the less stressful solution we have for you.
Seven features to look for in a web hosting platform
- Preemptive Support
Choosing a web hosting platform with reliable customer support is highly essential. During website development and management, it’s highly possible to run into issues that are hard to resolve or may not be corrected from your side. Therefore, you need a hosting platform that offers 24/7 customer support services.
A good hosting company must have a vast knowledge base on its website. They should have a bank of frequently asked questions on their resource page, which can be consulted by businesses to resolve any issue they are facing with their website hosting. Also, there should be a chatbot on their website that provides quick answers to questions and can connect you to a live chat with an expert in the company.
Before you choose a platform, you should check if they have forums and communities on social platforms. Social media forums will connect you with other business owners that use the same hosting platform. It serves as a medium through which ideas and experiences are shared among business owners.
Other signs of preemptive web hosting support include live calls and frequent online events and seminars. Great web hosting companies organize regular online events to educate users about new features. They also do this to get feedback from their customers.
- Service Level Agreement (SLA)
Service Level Agreement is a contract between a service provider and a customer stating everything the customer should expect from the deal. As important as this is, it’s unfortunate that we usually don’t discuss it.
Dear business owners, don’t trust all the promises on web hosting company websites. It’s just a mere advertising strategy until it’s written and signed as a contract.
The SLA contract enumerates all the hosting resources you should expect, including uptime, disk capacity, bandwidth, SSL offerings, and customer support responsiveness. It also carries information about the service cost, contract duration, and issue resolution time frame.
Service Level Agreement is an official document recognized in a court of law. Therefore, you can tender it to seek compensation for failure to deliver. If the contract says that customer service will respond within ten minutes, and the company fails to reply to your messages within that time frame, they have defaulted.
You would want to choose a serious company as your web hosting platform. The SLA document is proof of seriousness.
- No traffic restriction
A good website should withstand as much traffic as possible without slowing down or running into errors. This hosting quality is provided by the joint combination of other significant features. The following are the web hosting features and services that guarantee no traffic restriction;
- Dedicated server
Dedicated server is the cheapest form of web hosting that’s capable of withstanding unlimited traffic. A whole server is allocated to your website, and you have the whole storage space, CPU, RAM, and other website infrastructure to yourself. The most-cheapest web hosting option is shared hosting. Businesses should stay away from this hosting package. It usually crashes during holiday periods when websites are receiving massive traffic.
- High network bandwidth
Network bandwidth is the maximum amount of data your website can send to users over a certain period. The higher the bandwidth, the faster the loading speed and the bigger the amount of traffic your website can withstand. Shared hosts usually have limited bandwidth, but dedicated server bandwidth is usually in terabytes.
Do not be deceived by “unlimited bandwidth” usually advertised by web hosting platforms. There’s no such thing as unlimited bandwidth. They claim to offer this feature because they know it’s almost impossible for websites with little traffic to exceed their allocated bandwidth. And that makes the offer shady when they could have indicated the actual bandwidth size.
- Multiple hosting locations
Server location may not directly affect traffic, but it does influence the website page loading speed, which may become extremely slow when there’s pressure on the website. For this reason, you should pick a web host with a data center close to your market/audience. A server close to your audience will facilitate fast loading speed, leading to the admittance of more traffic to your website. You can read more about the importance of hosting locations here.
- No unique visitors per month restrictions
Unique visitors are those people entering your website for the first time. A business website should be able to accept an unlimited number of unique visitors. All the features mentioned to attain no traffic restrictions will ensure that no restrictions are placed on monthly unique visitors.
- 24/7 uptime monitoring
Uptime is the total time your website is available for access over a certain period. A business website should be active all the time. Orders should come in even when the business is physically closed for the day. Most platforms advertise 24/7 uptime, but it’s difficult to promise because of unforeseen circumstances that may come up in the future.
What you need is a web host that performs and supports uptime monitoring. You need a hosting platform that will respond to your request during this downtime and get your website back up within a few minutes.
- Auto healing
Auto healing is one of the latest web server technologies. Recently, web hosting platforms are beginning to adopt tools and A.I to solve both hardware and software server issues without the need for human intervention. This technology is used to correct frequent server errors.
Choosing a web hosting that uses this technology guarantees less downtime. This self-healing mechanism would mostly eliminate problems that should have caused you some back and forth with customer support.
- Scheduled health checks
Choose a web hosting platform that performs regular health checks to avoid downtime. Issues building up are usually discovered and corrected during the checks before they become huge. They might take days to resolve when they are fully built. Web hosts that perform health checks are the best.
The simple path to follow
As a business owner, you may not have the time to do all this research to choose a hosting platform. However, you can trust a digital marketing agency to choose the most suitable host for your business website. Premlall consulting offers the best website hosting service that provides all the essential features mentioned above.
We work with web hosts that are preemptive. They will notice your challenges even before you write them. We always sit with them to craft reasonable SLA deals for our clients. One of our aims is for your business to grow; therefore, we will help you choose a web host that allows you to admit an unlimited number of unique and returning visitors to your website.
You can trust us to provide you a host that performs regular health checks, has auto-healing tools, and performs uptime monitoring to reduce and eliminate downtown. Premlall web hosting service comes with other amazing benefits. You can begin this wonderful journey by booking consultation with us.
