What Features to Look For in a Hosting Service
Which hosting service you choose for your website can either make it or break it. It’s not something to cheap out on, but it’s also not something you should needlessly throw a lot of money on.
All you have to do is find one that can offer you the features you need, which are extremely important if you want to have a healthy site with good traffic. Be on the lookout for services that offer the following seven key features:
Website Speed
In this day and age, website speed is of the utmost importance. Your site should load in around 5 seconds. If it’s less, even better. This aspect can affect your overall traffic a lot. If your visitors are dissatisfied with how fast your website can load, they can repel them from ever coming back.
Nothing annoys people more than when they have to wait for the site to load. And you don’t want to get blamed for your visitors’ discontent and the fact that you might lose them as regulars just because your site’s speed wasn’t up to par.
Uptime
Naturally, you would want your website to be up as much as it possibly can be, right? Higher uptimes are definitely one of the most important aspects you should look for in a hosting service. Since nothing else even matters if your site is down.
So, the higher the average amount of time your website is up, the better. Just like website speed, this is also one of the elements that can greatly affect your traffic.
Support
Whichever hosting service you pick, you can always have some problems with any of its aspects that you might not know how to solve on your own. That’s why technical support is extremely important. High-quality customer support will solve your issues as quickly and efficiently as possible. Without any questions asked.
A lot of hosting services can offer you 24/7 customer support, either in the forms of chats, phones, or tickets.
Security
Security is important for both you as the site’s owner as well as anyone who visits your site. So, look for hosting services that can offer you top-notch security. Don’t skimp on it.
There’s a lot of malicious activity on the internet, so best make sure your site is not among the affected ones. SSL certificates can get you a lot of safety, and some hosting services even offer them for free. You should also look for plans with automatic scans for malware, spyware and other cracks in your site’s defense.
Backups
What’s the use of any of these features if you can instantly lose absolutely everything from your site in a second or so? Backups prevent this so you can rest easily. An efficient backup system makes sure you can restore your site as soon as possible so your downtime is close to none.
They should also do automatic backups so when it gets updates, the system saves the new changes. With this feature, you don’t have to worry about losing anything.
Website Builder
Many hosting services can give you access to website builders, which is quite a nifty thing to have. A lot of them are very easy to make your site with. Not to mention they are as user-friendly as it gets, with features such as a drag-and-drop builder that even the most inexperienced users can create a great site with.
It would be great if you could find a hosting service that also provides you with free-to-use images, custom fonts and CSS as part of the website builder feature.
Price
You will have to pay up to get a good, reliable hosting service that will include all of these features. But, you have to spend some money to earn some, right? You should not be looking for something to break your bank, though. Not every expensive hosting service is worth the money in the end.
Do some research and check out the services that will include the important features that were mentioned in this article, but look for the ones that seem like good value for money. Keep an eye on additional expenses that are sometimes hidden.
Conclusion
There you have it. The features mentioned in this article are all important for your site, and thus, your visitors. You would be wise not to skip on any of these when looking for a hosting service, so find one that can offer you all of those.
