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11 Key Questions To Find The Best Web Hosting Provider For Your Company

With so many different hosting options available to corporations it can get hard to select the perfect option. A cheap web hosting provider will over promise and under deliver, while others do exactly what they say they will and more but cost a lot more and others give you way too many features you’ll never need. Selecting a quality host can be a bit confusing, but it doesn’t have to be a hair tearing experience.

When you’re ready to get look for new hosting options, don’t look at the hosts first. Take a look at your company and your business model. Will you be selling products online or simply listing your logo and street address? Will you host applications, video, music, documents on there or will you have one or two graphics and that’s it? These and many more questions are things you should be asking before picking.

Sure you can go out and select the first well rated host from your favourite search engine. There are many who can host a website for $7 a month. If that’s all you need and don’t plan to outgrow that anytime soon then that’s what you should shoot for. But if you need something more robust, more reliable and with more kick to it … it’s time to look at your options.

Let’s start with some basic questions. [blockquote type=”blockquote_line” align=”right”]You need to know what you want before you can get it[/blockquote]

  1. How much can your company invest in it’s online ventures? What’s your budget?
  2. Does your business need a website to survive?
  3. Do you plan to generate leads from your site?
  4. Are you thinking of selling something through your site (eCommerce)?
  5. What’s the purpose of your website?
  6. What would happen to your business/income if your (future) website broke and wasn’t accessible?
  7. Do you want to host only one site or do you ever plan to expand?
  8. Are you going to store things on the server (client files, pdf’s, training material, ect…)?
  9. If you’re thinking of having video on the website? Will there be many videos?
  10. Will you be hosting anything else other than just the site? Such as applications, document management, downloads, and things of that nature?
  11. Is your business small, medium or large?

 

These questions will uncover your detailed needs. It’ll tell you if you need a really powerful server with lots of space and ram or a small server with not too many extra features. Let’s go through an example to see how this works.

  1. For hosting, at most $100 per month.
  2. Sort of, but not really.
  3. Yes
  4. Yes
  5. Mostly to give us an online presence and thus generate leads
  6. We’d lose some passive income, our rankings would drop and therefore our daily leads.
  7. Many many sites
  8. Yes, many files, forms and documents.
  9. Some video, but only things like intro videos or sales video.
  10. Need some place for our project management and backups, but other than that it’s all websites.
  11. Small

 

From this example we can see that this person doesn’t have the funds for a high end development server nor any type of server which have a 100% up time guarantee. So now we know to look for hosts who offer cheaper, less comprehensive plans. Next we know the person wants to generate leads, so uptime is an issue (since they also get some passive income through it) so the cheapest hosts (and plans) are out of the question.

Seeing that they will need more than just one simple site, they’ll need the ability to add more sites and domains through something like Cpanel. Though it doesn’t seem like they’ll need WHM (it’s a service tool that can control a VPS and such). All this person seems to need is just a place to store lots of sites, some files and a simple project management system. They don’t seem to need much bandwidth though they might need some extra storage space.

Though a big thing to note, is that since they say they are going to store backs and project management stuff it’ll be very important to select a hosting option which has backs-up services.

With this information you’ll be able to figure out your specific needs so that you don’t overpay for services you will never need nor will you select a service plan that doesn’t fulfill all your requirements.

If you’d you’re stuck and have trouble figuring out your needs and requirements and can’t select a proper web hosting provider and plan, we can help you with that. Contact us and we’ll find the perfect hosting option for you.

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