This article examines the key factors when choosing a web hosting service for your business.  

Knowing your business’s needs can help narrow down your web hosting options. Activities like 24/7 live-streaming or video blogging will require more resources. On the other hand, your hosting needs will be minimal if you intend to use your website as a blogging platform only. 

Websites with high regular traffic are unlikely to function well on shared hosting, which is designed for smaller websites with lower hosting requirements. 

Calculate the bandwidth you’ll need

Your bandwidth is the volume of data transferred between your website and its guests. It is measured in megabits per second (Mbps) or Gbps (gigabytes per second). The number of visitors to your site and the size of your media files and web pages will determine your bandwidth needs. 

Leaving room for growth is critical. Make sure there is no risk of your web hosting provider locking you into a specific bandwidth amount or internet speed because they will charge you extra if you decide to change your hosting plan with business growth. 

The following are benchmark values of the bandwidth in megabits per second:

• Basic email – 1 Mbps.
• Cloud-based services – 5 Mbps.
• Cloud backup – 2 Mbps.
• Cloud computing – 2 Mbps.
• Email with attachments – 15 Mbps.
• Data transfer – 2 Mbps.
• File sharing – 5 Mbps.
• General web browsing – 0.33 Mbps.

Make sure your web host can handle growth

New web hosting businesses sometimes try to win a market share with low prices, hoping that a large number of clients will make up for it. When they do obtain a lot of clients, they find out they’re unable to manage so many at once. If your business is growing, choose a more established web hosting company that can handle growth without compromising customer experience with issues like downtime, adverse effects on search rankings, and slow load speeds.

The price isn’t the only factor

Shared hosting can be between $2 and $5 a month, but this price often comes with poor customer service, slow servers, or excessive downtime. More and more business owners are choosing VPS hosting because it gives them power and control, like having a private server, but at a lower price. Experts predict that almost 85% of all companies will use cloud hosting by 2025. Cloud hosting is popular because it is reliable and can adjust to growing businesses’ needs.   

Check the quality of customer support

Before you commit to a hosting plan, check how to contact customer support. Is it easy and quick to contact a representative by chat, email, or phone? Check how they respond to your queries. As of 2024, 93% of support teams agree that customer expectations are higher than ever, and 80% of people report having negative experiences with customer service on a regular basis. 

Ask about the hosting provider’s security 

Almost every organization across the globe hosts some of its IT infrastructure in the cloud. Unfortunately, 43% of IT decision-makers labor under the misconception that cloud providers have to protect and recover public cloud data. That is not the provider’s responsibility. Less than a quarter of organizations have a tested, documented, and updated disaster recovery plan. 

A security flaw can be devastating to a business. Your hosting provider should have a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) to protect your customers’ data. SSL is critical to ensure secure and safe online transactions, and all reputable web hosts have this feature.  

Web hosting providers may provide manual backups, manual restoration, host-assisted restoration, or automated backups. Being able to perform manual backup and restoration is preferable because the host might take more time to do it than you expect. 

Uptime 

Finally, anything lower than 99.5% makes it difficult for businesses to deliver on a promise of reliability. If your website is offline, search engines can’t index it, which is detrimental to ranking, sales, and customer engagement.

Recap

• Know your required bandwidth in advance  
• Paying more for hosting is worth it
• Check the quality of customer support
• Ask about the hosting provider’s security features
• Uptime should be at least 99.5%