The best web hosting companies are often eager to market their services and offer the best features on the market today. However, not all features are created equal and so quality, support, and pricing are also things to consider when deciding between hosts.
There are many web hosting features you don’t need to pay for and others that can add value to your website and make your life easier.
This article will examine the best web hosting features you need to know and how they can affect your online business.
Why Does Hosting Matter?
Websites run on very concrete physical machines known as servers. This means that the performance of a server will highly depend on those pieces of hardware. The server covers aspects such as the website’s uptime, page load speed, performance, and failure resistance.
In addition to the quality of the hardware, it’s essential to consider the hosting provider and the services they offer. This includes the quality of their hosting solutions and support team and any additional services that may impact the website’s overall performance. So you should consider it during the MVP development for your startup.
Let’s examine each of these elements in more detail.
What Are The Best Web Hosting Features?
1. Uptime
Uptime is the amount of time that your website is available for visitors to access. If your website goes down, then your visitors are unable to see it or purchase from you.
The best web hosting services guarantee 99.99% uptime or better on all their web hosting plans. Fortunately, most web hosts guarantee such an uptime.
For example, Rocket.net guarantees 100% network uptime, which is pretty impressive. This promise ensures that every significant routing device in their network is always reachable over the global Internet.
2. Speed
Web hosting speed refers to how quickly your website loads. If your pages take too long to load, visitors will be annoyed and may leave before they buy anything.
A slow-loading website can also affect the SEO rankings of your pages, as Google prioritizes fast-loading sites in its search results.
A good web host like Rocket.net is the only hosting solution that gives your site a high speed score on mobile on Google’s PageSpeed Insights. Because mobile-first indexing is a top Google ranking factor, your website should be lighting fast on mobile and not only on desktop.
3. Technical Support
Even if the web hosting solution offers you the best conditions, there always remains space for technical failures and other issues that will damage your website’s performance.
Therefore, there can be nothing better than a team of professionals ready to help you fix this or that task, and that is 24/7 available support from the provider.
To ensure that the hoster provides optimal support, you can check the reviews about them on sites that deal with web hosting reviews.
4. Managed Hosting
Managing a website is always a task that needs a great deal of involvement from your side. Moreover, it can be related to different aspects, requiring time and dedication.
If you want to make the task easier by handing part of this work to someone else, then such an option as managed hosting can be a great way to do it. In this service, the hosting provider performs the technical aspect of your server management for an additional fee.
This is a great way to get one less task, so if you don’t feel technically savvy enough or want more time to invest in other aspects of your online business, look for web hosting companies that offer a managed hosting option.
5. Location
Another way your web host’s server can affect your online business is the location of your server. When choosing the conditions of your web hosting plan, you will come across the possibility of selecting the location of your server.
The server location affects your online business because it determines the latency, that is, the time a request from the visitor’s computer needs to reach your server and vice-versa. From this perspective, the location should be as close as possible to your target audience.
For example, if you live in the UK and need a stable and reliable solution with a fixed amount of resources, you can choose a UK virtual private server. On the other hand, you can choose dedicated hosting if you need maximum performance for bigger projects.
Moreover, the location will affect not only the subjective experience of your customers but also your SEO and how high in search engine rankings your site will be.
6. Security
The data involved in your business must not only be transmitted but must always be protected from the prying eyes of criminals.
Over the years, cyber attacks have constantly been getting more sophisticated, while the way to avoid them developed as well. That’s why hosting providers must follow hosting trends to provide clients with security measures that cover most cyber threats.
Therefore, ensure your web host can offer the newest and most ways of avoiding cyber threats. These may include DDoS protection, compliance checks for CMS vulnerabilities, standard SSL certification, encrypted data storage, etc.
7. Multiple Websites
Some web hosting plans allow you to manage multiple sites. Image what would be like to have one hosting account for each website you had—not very productive.
So, if you’re planning on creating multiple websites, ensure you select a web hosting plan that supports more than one, or even unlimited, websites.
8. FTP Access
FTP means File Transfer Protocol and is a method of transferring files between computers. Some web hosts offer FTP data transfer inside their dashboards, while others don’t.
If your web host offers FTP access, you’ll be able to upload your website files directly from your hosting account instead of using a third-party FTP client like FileZilla or Cyberduck on your local machine.
9. Disk Space
Disk space or storage is the amount of storage you have on your web server. It’s measured in gigabytes (GB), and most hosting plans offer at least 10 GB. The more disk space you have, the more files you can store on your website.
The amount of space you need on your hosting account depends on the type of website you are building.
For example, if you’re planning to start a book blog, it will likely require less than 10GB of disk space. However, more disk space is required for eCommerce sites and those with many files, such as streaming video or audio files.
Therefore, choosing the right web host is one of the most important steps when building a website.
10. Bandwidth
Bandwidth is the amount of data web servers transfer monthly, and it’s measured in gigabytes. This includes both incoming and outgoing traffic.
You need to ensure that the bandwidth cap on your hosting plan is sufficient for your needs; otherwise, you may end up paying more than necessary or even get hit with overage fees.
While it’s uncommon to find a dedicated server with unlimited bandwidth, most web servers offer a considerable amount of bandwidth. You can always upgrade to a higher hosting plan when you hit your resources’ limits.
11. Email Accounts
Every business today needs at least one email address, and oftentimes, they’ll require several. You can use one for your personal email and another for business purposes, such as sending newsletters or contact forms.
Some web hosting providers offer unlimited email accounts with their packages, while others charge extra.
12. SSL Certificates
SSL certificates are used to encrypt the data that you transmit across your website. This ensures that third parties cannot intercept it, which is especially important if you’re collecting sensitive information.
While many web hosts offer SSL certificates for free, others charge extra. Website owners should look for a hosting plan that includes an SSL certificate at no additional cost.
Types of Web Hosting
The most common types of web hosting are the following.
1. Shared Web Hosting
Shared hosting is perhaps the most popular type of web hosting. In this type of hosting, you share a server with other websites, so it has limited resources (memory and CPU).
The more sites you have on one web server, the slower each site will be because other sites might be using those resources at any given time.
2. VPS Hosting
VPS hosting is quite similar to shared hosting, but it offers you more control over your server.
With VPS hosting, you get a virtual private server fully dedicated to your website or applications. This means that you have access to all of the server resources on that machine, and no one else can use them while your site is using them.
3. Cloud Hosting
Cloud hosting is similar to VPS hosting, but it’s more flexible and scalable. With cloud computing, you get a virtual server located in a data center somewhere on the Internet.
When your site gets busy, you can scale up your resources to match the demand. You can also scale down when there are fewer visitors using your website or application.
A good web hosting company such as Cloudways offers multiple cloud servers and lets you scale your resources whenever you need them.
4. Managed WordPress Hosting
Managed WordPress hosting was explicitly developed with WordPress users in mind, as it is designed precisely for WordPress sites. It’s ideal if you want to use WordPress but don’t have the technical expertise required to set up and maintain a website on your own.
With managed WordPress hosting, the web hosting service takes care of everything from security patches and updates to backups. You can also expect 24/7 support via chat or phone with most hosting companies.
Conclusion
The website is the foundation of your online business while hosting is the foundation of your website.
There are many ways in which a good hosting choice will contribute to your website’s performance. At the same time, they’re the criteria for finding a good hosting provider.
This list of the best web hosting features will make choosing a reliable web host easier for you.
