Last updated on April 8th, 2024 at 08:07 am
When you choose a hosting service, it’s easy to automatically choose the cheapest option. Unfortunately, blindly purchasing hosting from just any company can seriously damage your online business reputation.
It’s important that you understand how a server operates so that you can know if you’re purchasing the best website hosting server to keep your site accessible by the public. When you upload your website online, you’re essentially storing your documents, pages, blog posts, pictures, and other media on what’s known as a server. What you’re paying for when you buy web hosting is a piece of a server.
To understand this, think of a bookshelf. You need a single shelf to store your books, so you rent one from a reliable company. This is similar to how web hosting works. The problem is if that bookshelf (or in this case, the server) isn’t sturdy, your information won’t be accessible. It will still be stored on the server, but it won’t be served to your customers. They can’t take a book from the shelf – or see a page on your site.
For many entrepreneurs, their main concern is search engine optimization – when it should be finding a reliable web hosting company. It won’t matter how good you are with SEO tips and techniques if your website isn’t live when visitors want to see it.
Backlinks that you’ve worked hard to build won’t matter either if your hosting company’s server is perpetually down. Before selecting a web hosting service, carefully read the terms of service.
Many hosting service clearly spell out their uptime. Uptime is how long the server is working correctly. While every host will differ, you want a company that guarantees uptime of a minimum of 99.5%.
There are several reliable companies that will even offer you as much as 99.9% of server uptime. Due to technical issues and maintenance, you’ll never find a company that can give you a promise of 100% uptime – and if you do find one promising just that, get as far away as possible because it means they’re being dishonest.
With so many shady hosting companies around, it’s vital that you choose the best website hosting server for your online business. Many first time online business owners make the mistake of thinking that all hosting is created equal.
If you’re looking to host your website through a free service, you may want to consider that significant downtime can be an issue with free hosting. It doesn’t matter if, thanks to your SEO efforts, you’re in the top three spots on search engine ranking pages if a visitor or even the robots can’t access your website.
For this reason, you want to make sure you purchase reliable hosting so your website is always available and free hosting solutions are notorious for server problems. Ultimately, working hard on SEO or any other traffic generating technique won’t benefit your online business if you’re not using a reliable website hosting server to ensure that your site stays online, so make the your #1 priority and then engage in strategic SEO tactics.
