How to Choose the Perfect Hosting for a Large Website: A 10-Step Guide
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Any business is greatly dependable from minor details, and owners should better control each small thing for profitability. General user experience is crucial for any big or large company. Choosing the right host as well as monitoring news about hosting features is extremely important; by doing this, you are providing your client with safety, reliability, good performance, and may even double traffic.
By picking the wrong hosting, it is highly possible that you will greatly spoil the users’ experience of the clients. That is even possible if you are using a good provider but have chosen a plan which isn’t suitable for your needs. That’s why we decided to write a step-by-step explanation guide on all the processes which should be considered before the choice of the perfect solution.
Choose the purpose of the site
Prior to searching for the hosting provider, you’d better spend some time and do actual preplanning and create a specific strategy by writing down the major point. So that when you start the search process, it will be much easier and you won’t waste time on useless plans and providers that aren’t covering your requirements.
Think about the type of site you will have, whether it will be an e-commerce platform, blog, or portfolio website. Calculate the approximate number of users, you are expecting to have during the month’s period. Check how much storage your files will need.
By only considering those three criteria, you will already have a rather decent plan of the major characteristics that your site will include and greatly narrow the search filtering.
Bandwidth requirements
Nothing is more annoying than waiting for the website to load especially if that occurs regularly. To exclude this probability, it is highly recommended to check the bandwidth characteristics prior to choosing and paying for the actual plan. The more users are expected according to your plan as well as downloads and uploads, the higher the bandwidth should be.
If you are just launching a website, and don’t have any approximate numbers then you should look for plans with the possibility of growth. It means you can buy bandwidth as your audience is growing.
Here are some actual numbers that can assist a little bit with the calculations. The standard website of 20 000 clients per month, five pages, and a page size of 50KB will require 5 GB. Out of this number, you can calculate whether it should be higher or lower for your specific case.
Pay attention to the website-building tools
If you have already created a web platform, then you probably know the tool that has been used. For instance, for those who have applied WordPress, web hosting plans should be compatible and support it. In case you don’t have a website yet, it is a good point to think about beforehand.
Those business owners, who are planning to move from one host provider to another, are recommended to check for the options for website migration.
Check the websites of the competitors
Once you have created a web platform, the good choice is to search online for similar websites with such characteristics and directly contact and ask about their experience of hosting. The easier option is just to use a tool, where you fill in the URL, and hosting data will be shown to you.
Orient on the major priorities
Once you have got some sort of plan, range all the criteria according to your needs and start searching for the right provider. Determine the price range and that will also narrow your search greatly.
Type of Hosting
Here are such variants of hosts as:
- Shared host.
- VPS or private server.
- Cloud.
- Dedicated host.
Safety features
To check whether a provider has the safety you need, pay attention to the next criteria. The first one is RAID, which is important for files and information protection from spammers or hackers. It might be already offered with the host or at least the host provider can offer its pre-installation. The next things, you should remember are: backups, uptime, and a secure data center.
Determine the budget
Do not search for something extremely cheap or too expensive and orient only on the price. Set some frames that will be budget-friendly for your company, but prioritize other main characteristics such as safety, bandwidth, host type, and more.
Read Reviews
Most people are oriented on the site, its design, and its price, but it is important to check other resources as well. By reviewing a couple of platforms where users share their real experience you will get more information about some pluses and minuses.
Customer support
This criterion speaks for itself. Don’t you agree that quick and professional assistance is crucial?
Wayne Kernochan has been an IT industry analyst and auther for over 15 years. He has been focusing on the most important information-related technologies as well as ways to measure their effectiveness over that period. He also has extensive research on the SMB, Big Data, BI, databases, development tools and data virtualization solutions. Wayne is a regular speaker at webinars and is a writer for many publications.
