A web host is a very crucial business partner especially if your business heavily depends on online presence. How good or bad a web hosting service is affects the business in many ways including customer satisfaction, brand reputation, and ultimately its bottom line. You don’t want to choose a web hosting service that will negatively affect your business.
Here are 6 mistakes to avoid when making that choice:
1.Buying Based on Price Only
Web hosts price their offers in different ways. Hosting packages can be free or priced at a few to hundreds of dollars. Many individuals are blinded by pricing. On one hand, one can go for the free or the cheapest package thinking that all hosting is the same. On the other hand, a good proportion of buyers assume that the higher the price of a hosting package the better it is, so they go for those that cost more.
It is important to realize that the web hosting market is very competitive. Special offers and price cuts are used by great hosts to win customers. You can actually make considerable savings with cheaper options or discounted packages. Therefore, it is wise to consider the offer itself and not concentrate too much on price.
2. Not Testing Customer Service Prior to Buying a Hosting Plan
If there’s one sure thing about running a website, it is that you will need to contact customer service frequently. It would be great to know how supportive a host’s customer service actually is before buying their hosting service.
Can you reach them 24/7 using the given channels?
Does the customer support staff have technical knowledge that can help you get out of a situation?
Get first-hand experience of the host’s customer service. Don’t just believe what the host claims or what reviews say about the company.
3. Not Taking Time to Understand Terms and Conditions
Why do we have a tendency of ignoring terms of service when signing up for services? What a host puts on promotion banners and pop-up adverts is usually the most captivating aspects of the service. Most of the details about how the service really works are buried deep in the terms and conditions of the service.
When you think you have found a host that can provide the kind of web hosting you are looking for, sit down to read the ToS carefully and note areas you need to ask for clarification. This will help to get what you actually want and avoid issues in the future.
4. Not Thinking Long Term
Long term thinking is needed when selecting the disk space and bandwidth usage to subscribe to. The amount of storage and bandwidth you subscribe to is of critical importance to your business. Consider an instance where you subscribe to 2 GB bandwidth. After a short while your site starts getting larger volumes of traffic every day. Since you cannot upgrade, the site faces a downtime problem. This can take your business many steps back. If you subscribe to 10GB bandwidth, you run your business without any worry about transfer limit even when your site grows and starts getting tons of hits.
5. Not Considering that Web Hosting will Affect SEO
Getting an affordable package that guarantees you 99% uptime can sound good. However, the same hosting plan could be a killer to your SEO efforts. According to HostInspection, there are certain things related to web hosting that significantly affect your sites outlook both to search engines and humans. These include site speed, runtime errors, internal server error, and database connection errors.
Using shared hosting with spam sites can also damage your company’s reputation to Google bots and humans. The web host you choose must be considerate of your SEO needs otherwise you will experience many difficulties when marketing your products and services.
6. Not Knowing Your Limits
Many web hosting service marketers like using terms like ‘free’ and ‘unlimited’ storage and bandwidth. However, there are limits to everything in reality. Hosts have to put restrictions on storage and bandwidth usage for smooth running of the service. The hard drives, bandwidth used by the server, and the electricity consumed by the server are all costs that the host must control. Insist on knowing the true limits of the hosting service you are about to purchase to avoid disappointments.
Avoiding the above common mistakes starts by having a deeper understanding of web hosting. Information on this topic is ubiquitous on the internet. Search anything you would like to know about web hosting and a lot of content will come up. Read and understand important aspects such as types of web hosting, disk space and bandwidth, uptime and downtime, and so on. In addition, take time to read reviews, testimonials and forum comments. With extensive information about the topic, you will be in a better position to understand the specifics of every web hosting offer as you do your comparisons.
