Have you been considering creating a personal or business website? More than likely, you have begun to think about logos, content, and color schemes. However, you may be forgetting one of the most critical errors of the process, your hosting.
Having the right type of hosting is essential for a reliable website. There are several things to consider when looking for website hosting. This article is designed to help you consider three elements that you should consider before you purchase your hosting package.
1. Ease of Use
One of the first things you need to consider is the ease of use of your hosting platform. The vast majority of hosting services will offer an easy to use control panel (mainly cPanel) to give you full control over the features and extensive functionality of your hosting. From within this control panel, you will have access to a myriad of settings specific to the hosting plan you are subscribed to. Using Softaculous or similar application accessible from within your control panel, you will be able to install distinct content management systems, including WordPress, Joomla!, Drupal, along with various e-commerce as well as social networking applications.
Apart from these basic functionalities, you will have access to domain-related settings that will allow you to configure and assign a domain name to your subscribed server. Additionally, you will be able to assign additional domains using the “Addon domain” setting. You will also be able to create subdomains, email accounts, FTP accounts, etc.
Understand that the ease of your hosting depends on what hosting plan you are subscribed to. If you are subscribed to a shared hosting from HostGator or Seekahost, then you will definitely have access to control panels like cPanel or Plesk. If you are on VPS (which essentially stands for virtual private servers) or dedicated server, then access to cPanel or Plesk will depend on whether you have invested in managed hosting plan or not. But there is no need to feel disheartened in case you are subscribed to an unmanaged hosting plan because, in such a case, you can install any operating system and application imaginable on your server.
2. Room to Grow
Another consideration when thinking about website hosting is the ability to grow. When you first build your website, you are not going to get that much traffic. In fact, it may take months before you begin to see a steady stream of visitors to your site. However, when they do come, you want to ensure that you are going to have the bandwidth needed to support large spikes of traffic. Ensure that the hosting provider is going to make it as easy as possible to upgrade your plan to take care of large amounts of traffic. In fact, many of the best web hosting companies will take care of all of the upgrades for you.
What Is the Most Secure Web Hosting?
Web hosting companies are many in number, but only a few qualify as secure, reliable, and user-friendly hosting companies. As a customer, responsible business owner, blogger or Internet marketer, you want to host your website on a secure web server that guarantees the integrity of all your content and has an appropriate user authentication system to prevent any unauthorized access.
In the past, there have been many reports of breaches in web hosting companies, including the most famous Go Daddy breach that resulted in the exposure of 31,000 hosting accounts.
Knowing that even the sites hosted on Go Daddy (which is one of the few global web hosting giants) makes you rethink your web hosting decision. As an Internet marketing professional, I host all my websites on Hostgator and Seekahost, and for the past 10 years, I have not experienced a single problem regarding security, ease of use, or customer support. Although they can be classified as cheap web hosting services, their customer support, upgrade options, the refund policy, and commitment to customer satisfaction position them along with the big boys in the hosting industry.