If you are in the process of selecting the right hosting provider for your online business, you are at the right place.
Today, I will help you decide the best hosting option for your website by listing out seven must-have features that you need to look for when finalizing a vendor.
What is Hosting
What’s the right hosting for you?
Seven Features You Need to Look While Choosing the Right Hosting Provider
Optimized Stack
Scalability
Price
Multi-Cloud Platform
24/7 Support
Security
Backups
There are numerous hosting providers available out there, and it’s overwhelming when it comes to choosing the best for your online business. Because all hosting providers claim they offer the best services, and that’s not true! How are you going to check and decide what the right hosting is for your website?
All you need to do is check the highlighted seven must-have hosting features. But before that, it would be better to understand what hosting is and the types. This way you will be able to decide what’s the difference and what’s the best for you.
What is Hosting
Hosting is a service that provides you the platform and webspace where you store your web files and other data to make it live and accessible on the internet.
There are mainly three types of web hosting providers:
1. Shared Hosting: This is a hosting provider where a single server is shared between multiple users.
- It is cheaper when you compare the price with dedicated and cloud hosting.
- It is slow when you compare the performance with the other two hosting providers.
- It is designed for small websites.
2. Dedicated Hosting: This hosting offers a dedicated server that belongs to you only, and the resources are not shared with other users.
- The price is higher and expensive compared to others.
- High performance.
- Designed for only high traffic and complex sites.
3. Cloud Hosting: The most popular hosting that offers highly scalable, reliable, and secure cloud servers with dedicated resources.
- The affordable price.
- High performance.
- Designed for both small and large web applications.
What’s the right hosting for you?
Now, you know what type of hosting options are available in the market, and it would not be wrong to say that cloud hosting is the clear winner when it comes to price, performance, and reliability. But managing cloud servers by their native platform requires an adequate level of expertise in running Linux commands and a basic understanding of various stacks. Therefore, a lot of users prefer a managed cloud hosting platform for hosting their website on a cloud server.
A managed cloud hosting provider like Cloudways offers an intuitive platform where you can instantly launch your cloud server on top five cloud infrastructure providers such as AWS, GCP, Linode, DigitalOcean, and Vultr. It is very popular among WP users and is known as Managed WordPress hosting.
Seven Features You Need to Look While Choosing the Right Hosting Provider
Here, I will take Cloudways as an example and discuss seven hosting features that you need to look at while choosing a hosting company for your desired online business.
So let’s get started!
Optimized Stack
Performance is an essential factor when it comes to your online business because it helps you grow and generate some business revenue. If your website is slow and you are running an online store, in that case, you will lose potential customers and users because the page loading time will take too long to load.
If your hosting provider offers an optimized stack like LAMP or LEMP, you can expect your site to be faster. Cloudways offers a hybrid and optimized stack that consists of a LAMP stack with NGINX. This hybrid approach makes it stand out from the rest and the fastest WordPress hosting, which is specially designed to improve site speed and performance.
Scalability
Scalability plays a significant role if you are running an online business. For instance, your business starts growing and now you are looking for a bigger server. In that case, you need a scalable platform from where you can easily upgrade your servers to fulfill your website requirement. With Cloudways, you can quickly scale up the server resources and specs at any moment with a click of a button.
Price
Price is also an essential factor that you need to consider before choosing a hosting provider for your website. As I mentioned above, cloud servers are affordable, and when it comes to Cloudways, the basic plan starts from $10 for a 1GB managed DigitalOcean cloud server.
Multi-Cloud Platform
You should be able to host multiple cloud servers (AWS, Google Cloud, Linode, etc.) on a single platform. This way, you can easily migrate your site and switch from one cloud provider to another. For instance, if you want to change your cloud server from DigitalOcean to Google Cloud, Cloudways simplify it greatly.
It’s about the flexibility that it provides to its customers where they can freely use separate cloud providers from a single platform.
24/7/365 Support
The ideal hosting should provide you 24/7 expert support assistance. If you are running with any technical issues, they will be able to resolve them as soon as possible. Cloudways offers prompt 24/7 support assistance via live chat or ticket system. The standard support is free for all their customers that provide greater peace of mind.
Security
Maintaining security for your web application is the biggest challenge these days. Your right hosting provider should offer enough security features that will help secure your websites and servers as well. Cloudways offers multiple security firewalls that are designed to protect your site and server from all angles. They recently added a new Bot Protection feature that will help users automatically block malicious and bot traffic.
Backups
Backup is the process of storing the copy of the website and other data on a separate server, and you can restore or recover if something goes wrong or an unplanned event occurs on the running site. Cloudways offers automated backups, and with a few clicks, you can instantly restore your website to the previous version (date). Also, you can change the backup frequency rate and take a backup at any moment.
Wrapping It Up!
Hosting is an important factor and it plays a crucial role to ensure the success and growth of your online business. Therefore, it is vital to choose the right and best hosting for your dream website. I hope this article helped you understand what hosting is and what features you need to look at while selecting a hosting company.
If you find this article useful or would like to add something, please share your feedback in the comments section.
Author Bio: Farhan Ayub is a Community Manager at Cloudways. He loves to work with WordPress and has a passion for web development. Mostly, he spends his time interacting with the people in the WordPress community. Apart from his work life, Farhan spends his time gaming and playing sports.
