You know, it’s only natural for us bootstrappers to look for the cheapest and most reliable web hosting solutions for our business websites. What we often forget is the fact that the best value for money web hosting provider is probably not the best for your particular type of business websites.
Business websites come in many flavours: Business blogs, eCommerce sites, company profiles, portfolio sites (photography sites, freelancer sites, etc.), web directories, search sites (job search, document search, etc.,) web applications (online collaboration tools, business productivity tools, etc.), and many more. You need a relevant web hosting to best support your business websites and your plan to grow yours.
Why a relevant hosting is important?
Here’s a cold hard truth: Not all web hosting providers can handle all types of web hosting well. For example, if you want to build a business blog with WordPress, you need to look for a web hosting provider that is WordPress-savvy. By WordPress-savvy, I mean that the web servers are optimized for hosting WordPress-based sites and customer support people understand the issues related to WordPress.
You could go to any web hosting providers – quality and affordable ones, of course – but without ensuring whether the web hosting providers’ servers are fully-optimized with your business website’s framework, you should expect some issues later on.
For example, the most recent minor issue I have with my WordPress-powered sites is the latest web server update done by my web hosting provider. Here’s the problem: I can’t add any images from the content editor with “temporary folder is missing” error – I didn’t change a thing for a long time. I ask my web hosting provider about it and the very helpful customer support can’t help me solve my problems. I ended up looking for answers from Google and finally found a way to handle the issue.
It’s not their mistake – it’s mine. I should go for WordPress-savvy web hosting, instead.
Tips on choosing a relevant hosting
That being said, I have some tips to help you choose the most relevant web hosting for your business websites:
1. Use tools to check web hosting relevancy
You should find web tools to Check Hosting Relevancy Before Buying. I recommend you to use HostUCan’s Host Relevancy Check feature found in every web hosting company page found on HostUCan. To add, HostUCan also feature an uptime monitoring tool to help you track your website uptime and performance.
2. Read web hosting reviews
You should visit hosting review sites to learn more about the particular web hosting service you are interested in. Reviews are personal experience of hosting clients – so, consider their rants and raves to help you find relevant hosting for your business website.
3. Consult with the hosting company’s sales people
Asking the web hosting company directly often helps. Just contact the sales department via online chat or email to inquire whether the hosting solutions are compatible with your business website’s framework. It’s likely that they will forward you to the tech support team. Be sure to ask as many questions as possible as it’s better to clear any doubts early than finding out issues later on – migrating your websites to another web hosting provider is a real hassle.
Ivan Widjaya
On choosing relevant web hosting