When you start a business in this modern world, you need to have online presence. The first step to take for your online presence and visibility is having a website. When…
When you start a business in this modern world, you need to have online presence. The first step to take for your online presence and visibility is having a website. When you want to run a website smoothly, you need to have the right web hosting service. Managed web hosting is one of the most popular methods of website hosting because the web host takes care of any hardware and software related upgrades and activities. There are, however, certain things that you must pay attention to before you get on board with a certain web host. Here are a few points to pick the right managed web host.
Up Time
This is probably the most important of all factors when you want high quality web hosting service. Most hosting companies would claim to have 99.99% uptime, but it requires some research to know if they are telling you the truth. If there is any managed web host that claims to have uptime below 99%, you would want to stay away from them despite their justifications. Do some basic math as to how many hours your website will be down for after a year if they offer something like 98% uptime. To put it in simple words, the downtime for your website should be close to zero.
Multiple Domain Support
No matter how much you try to avoid it, you will succumb to the temptation of owning more domains than one. Domains are probably the cheapest items you can find on the internet with such huge impact. But when you have multiple domains, you need servers to host them. Your managed web hosting service should provide you with sub-domain add-on feature where you can own and run multiple domains on the same server. If nothing, you might just want to have multiple domains because you want to own not only the .com domain but .net and other relevant domains for your business name too.
The Costs
Surely, pricing remains the common factor for any transaction made in any corner of the world. Pricing should be an important factor when you are picking your managed web hosting service. It is highly recommended that you research and look at several hosts before you pick one. The important piece of information to keep in mind here is to know the renewal costs of your contract. In most cases, hosting services are pretty affordable for the first signup but the renewal fees are quite high. You would also want to read the fine print of their terms of use in order to know that staying with the same host in future will be viable.
Ecommerce Support
If you are going to run an ecommerce website, you need a host that offers a solution particularly suited for ecommerce websites. Such a web host will make it convenient for you to introduce ecommerce elements on your website. For example, they should give you a dedicated IP because this will help you obtain your SSL certificate. SSL encryption is crucial for any ecommerce website today. Furthermore, you would want your shopping cart to be installed with ease on your website. This and much more will be possible easily if your web host has a solution tweaked for ecommerce websites.
Response Time
With managed web host the operations of your web hosting are in the hands of the service provider. They are the ones who will take care of any software and hardware related upgrades and troubleshooting. However, there are times when you would encounter an issue and want an instant solution for that. This is where you have to see how quickly they respond to your query in terms of not only picking your phone but resolving the problem as well. This will also be a good test of the level of customer service they provide.