Finding the right hosting provider is a responsible task since a good hosting provider means the stable and uninterrupted operation of your website, quick page load speed, maximum uptime, and security of your data. To provide all these benefits, a host must meet certain criteria which make up a rather long list, so it might be not an easy task to detect a good hosting provider offhand, without any preliminary knowledge. Thus, in order to provide you with the latter, we’ve prepared the following article with 8 essential features of a good host.
1. 24/7 support
Even if you are provided with excellent infrastructure, reliable hardware and software, in a good data center, etc., there may always happen diverse technical issues that can affect the operation of your website, reducing the efficiency of your project and pushing away potential customers. In order to cope with it as promptly as possible, the technical support of the provider must be available at any time.
2. Backup
Server failures leading to the loss of data are another technical issue that can appear unexpectedly and create problems for your project which can be critical at times. To ensure that your data won’t disappear leaving no trace, make sure that the copies of it are stored on separate servers and that the provider is able to restore it as soon as possible.
3. 99,99% Uptime
Uptime means the time of your website’s availability. This parameter is crucial for natural reasons because as long as your website is down, you are losing your customers, money, and chances to make your dreams come true. Moreover, the aspect of uptime is also considered by search engine rankings, which is another important factor in your website’s efficiency. Therefore, you have to look for the maximum uptime available – and even not 99% but 99,99%, because 99%, which seems decent at first sight, will result in 7 hours of downtime a month, which is already quite a few.
4. Managed services
Another moment that a good hosting provider has to offer is the possibility to hand them over tasks of your server management. Of course, you can take over this task on your own, especially if you have enough knowledge and experience, but in any way, they are rather time-consuming and need attention, so if time these are the resources of higher priority for you, you can just order managed services and be sure that the provider will take care of keeping your server operating system and its applications up to date as well as other server management tasks.
5. Potent security features
The internet is full of cyber criminals that are constantly searching for sites with vulnerabilities to exploit them for their cybercrimes. If your website becomes a victim of such a malefactor, you can end up losing your data, having reduced performance, spreading viruses, or dealing with other problems. To avoid this, you should make sure that your provider offers all possible measures of security. Firewalls, SSL encryption, email scanning, anti-spam, and other features will definitely help your website become protected against the hidden dangers of the web.
6. Migration services
While you grow, it’s very likely that sooner or later you will face the necessity to migrate your website to another server. For this reason, a good host has to provide free migration services to facilitate this task for you. If not, the provider probably lacks the necessary technical or human resources, which is a bad sign regardless of whether you will need to migrate your website or not.
7. Scalability
If not migrating, you are also pretty much likely to need to ask for better hardware capacities, also known as rescaling, at some point in time. For this reason, make sure to check if the provider offers scalable resources on a pay-as-you-go basis, so you won’t have to suffer from reduced performance waiting for them.
8. SSL certificates
The SSL certificates are the certificates that provide the encryption of data your website is dealing with. They are especially important for financial transactions, as the latter involves sensitive data that must be kept secret at any cost. For this reason, websites that do not have SSL certificates are flagged as “unsafe”, which can on its own push away a lot of customers. Moreover, SSL certificates are crucial not only to provide the security of your customers’ data but also for your website to be high ranked by search engines. By and large, never go to a hosting provider that does not offer SSL certificates.
Conclusion
These were some 8 basic aspects that must be present at a good hosting provider. Of course, this list is not comprehensive, but it’s a good point to start. If you want us to give an example of a hosting provider that satisfies these requirements, check out hostzealot and you will understand what we were talking about. Take care!
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