Choosing a Good Web Host, and Why it Matters
Before I jump into todays post I want to make note that I am not endorsing or sponsored by any of the service providers that I may mention. There are many web hosts out there and the ones mentioned in this article are ones I and others I have worked with have experience using.
Choosing a good web host is extremely important and should be one of the first things you think about when launching your digital marketing campaign. Choosing a web host is like choosing a home for you to live in. You want your house to be easily accessible to major highways (unless you’re all about that rural life), from a reputable builder, build with quality materials, have a security system for your protection, and well maintained. Your server should be no different, easily accessible for speed purposes, from a reputable hosting company, the server should be built with quality parts, be secure against attacks, and have 24×7 maintenance.
Breaking down that small list and getting granular with each item, let’s understand why all of that is important in the big picture.
Your server should be easily Accessible.
Accessibility should be a primary concern for your digital assets. The speed at which your website load, in the big picture, affects your SEO (Search Engine Optimization). If your website take longer than 5 seconds to load more than likely people are going to exit your site before they even have a chance to see your content. Google looks at this as providing a poor user experience and penalizes you for that. Now you have 2 thing working against you already in reaching your digital marketing goals, people leaving your site before content loads, and google penalizing you for it and causing you to rank low. Most companies are pretty good about having speedy servers, but my recommendations for speed are, HostGator and GoDaddy. They are both well-known and have excellent data centers.
Your Web Hosting Company Should be Reputable
More than likely you would buy a house from “Jim-bob Eugene House Erectors” because you’ve probably never heard of him, on the other hand, you’re more apt to buy from David Weekly, KB Homes, Pulte, or one of the other well-known home builders here in the US. Your web hosting provider should be no different.
Here is my preferred list of Web Hosts and why (from a feature stand point):
- HostGator – They use cPanel so back-end management is real easy and they have a great knowledge base
- GoDaddy – Well known and offer many different platforms for hosting
- SiteGround – Great for WordPress websites, they have servers set up specifically to run WordPress at optimal speeds
- Rackspace – They are a hosting company & data center so it’s one point of attack as well as modern equipment.
Servers should be using quality parts.
Part of server speed and performance is what the server is built with. You really don;t want to be on a dual-core 1.6GHz server and trying to run an e-commerce site, for those that don’t speak computer hardware lingo, that’s “old antiquated” technology from the mid 2000’s, which I guess makes me ancient because I was born in ’89. You want to try to get as close to the latest and greatest, within budget of course, as possible. That’s going to be great for site speed and loading times, which in-turn help out with user experience and SEO rankings. If you’re unsure on what’s good or what a standard right now, Google will be your best friend. Most companies are pretty good about having servers using up to date technology, but my recommendations are, HostGator and GoDaddy. They are both well-known and have excellent data centers.
Your server should be secure.
Security should be your primary concern when choosing a web host. If you’re an e-commerce site, you’re probably going to be storing confidential data such as names, addresses, phone numbers, and maybe even credit card information. It is top priority to protect that data, and it’s a business and even a personal liability if anything happens.
I’m going to give you some information that most people wont be able to give you, ask about managed threat detection monitoring, ask about a managed web application firewall (WAF), and ask if they are PCI-DSS and HIPAA compliant. These are 3 VERY import questions to ask hosting providers when choosing one. Why? A WAF is going to help protect against abnormal external scripts from running as well as SQL injections for database driven websites, they can even block known malicious IPs from even accessing your site. Managed threat detection monitoring is a proactive approach to letting you know if something malicious is going on with your site. Finally PCI and HIPAA compliance is if you’re taking credit card information (PCI-DSS) or storing medical data and records (HIPAA) on your server it needs to be protected.
24 x 7 x 365 Monitoring & Support
You need continuous monitoring and support incase something happens and you go down. Most hosting companies offer this, but where the extra mile is, is letting you know before something fails that they’re going to fix it, and by that I mean from a hardware point of view, and there’s no 100% way of knowing when something is about to fail, but a good data center will have hardware monitoring software. You also to make sure downtime is at minimal with experienced staff either at the hosting company or the data center. For me I’m not a fan of GoDaddy, my experience with GoDaddy support has been sub par at best and they seem under educated when you start asking more technical questions. So for support my best experiences have been with the following:
- HostGator
- Rackspace
- SiteGround
Picking your Web Host is important and I hope you have a better understanding of why it’s important and the questions you should ask when choosing one. Please let me know if you have any questions or want more information on hosting.