Your website’s performance is crucial to the success of your business. There is no shortage of options when it comes to web hosting services; there are thousands to choose from, all with different price points and security features. Choosing the right web host will help your website run at optimum efficiency and help you avoid potential disasters.

Which plan do I need?

There are two types of hosting plans. Decide which one suits your company’s needs before you look into security features.

Individual Hosting Plans

These plans offer hosting for one website with limited bandwidth and storage. These plans are typical for small businesses that don’t experience a lot of traffic. You can upgrade your plan if your traffic and the content of your website outgrows the limits of your individual hosting plan.

Dedicated Servers

For larger businesses, these plans are necessary to handle the large amounts of traffic and storage requirements.

What features do I need?

Uptime/Downtime

A lot of web hosting services claim 100% uptime, but you can never count on this to be true. Downtime results in lost potential customers. The easiest way to find out if a web host’s server is reliable or not is to read reviews. Some provide a refund for downtime.

Backups

You should consider choosing a web hosting service that does back-ups. Most offer daily, weekly, or monthly backups in case of emergency, so if your server goes down, you can restore your website to a recent state. Some offer manual backups which you can do yourself whenever you update your website.

Monitoring

You don’t want your data to be held somewhere where it isn’t being protected from threats. Find a web host that actively monitors your internal network for viruses, malware, intrusions, or any unusual activity. Web hosts that are good at monitoring have far less chance of malware spreading from server to server until it hits the one hosting your website.

Extra Domain Names

If you’re planning on having multiple domain names, you need a web hosting account that allows it.

E-Commerce Features

If you are running an e-commerce website and you need a web store and shopping cart feature, you’ll need web hosting with SSL certification, dedicated IP, and one-click shopping cart software installation.

Control Panel

You should pick a hosting provider with an easy to use control panel, so you can make small updates on your own without getting lost.