One of the key components of every successful website, although often taken for granted is web hosting. At some point, every business owner needs to have an online presence. If you are thinking about it now, you are probably late. But don’t worry there is still time for everyone to catch up.
Choosing the right hosting is a philosophy. You need to do your homework. List all your needs and wishes, and bring your possible choices to a few good ones. This way you are minimizing your chance to fail. And since a good website can make or break your business, don’t take this lightly.
Know your needs
Since there are different types of hosting almost every provider offers: free, shared, VPS and dedicate. You should first try to determine which one is best for you. On the other hand, if you already chose WordPress as your CMS platform, providers often offer WordPress hosting, as a separate service.
With WordPress being the most popular CMS platform in the world, powering millions of websites around the globe, you can’t go wrong with this platform for your website. Once you settled with WordPress as your CMS you should look for advantages of specifics WordPress hosting can offer.
Tailor-made plans are always better
As a targeted solution, WordPress hosting is tailored for specific features of the WP platform, in order to maximize its performance. Depending on your website’s needs you still need to choose between shared, VPS and dedicated WordPress hosting, so choose your plan wisely.
Whatever plan you choose, WordPress hosting should provide better security features, since it is addressing vulnerabilities that are platform-specific. Something like a good mix of beginner-friendly and advanced features Hostinger offers with its plans. For the same reason, upgrades and security features are faster and easier to install, which provides you peace of mind. Support, backup, website builder, everything can handle with ease, and more efficient. Since the staff is already familiar with the platform, and its performance, problems and features.
Bonus features
Since this covers most of the things your new hosting should provide, there are some specific features that could further improve your website performance, and that you can look for in plans.
Since WordPress is a well-known platform, try to find a provider that offers some kind of “One Click WP installation”. No one likes to deal with complicated configurations and installation, and good install wizard can save you a lot of time and trouble.
Specific WP plugins and SSD support for fast website loading can make a difference in many fields. Hosting providers often try to offer specific, custom-built and pre-installed caching plugins that can significantly speed up your website. That way, your SEO can show its full potential, since Google crawler takes website speed into the equation while making its search engine rankings.
Every serious hosting providers offer some kind of security but bear in mind that security is one of the most important things these days. It doesn’t matter if you have the greatest website in the world if it is often down because of attacks. Different layers of protection help you sleep at night and keep your website safe.
It is very similar to backup. Don’t settle for manual backup, rather look for a website with plans that include regular daily or weekly backup, keeping your data safe, in case of an unfortunate event.
Registering the right domain(s)
After all this is taken care of, all you need to do now is to pick a great domain name. And since every hosting provider offers domain registration, try to keep these two things under the same roof.
Think of something memorable and easy to spell, and don’t run away from merging two or three words together (just look at Facebook, YouTube, Instagram…). Know your audience and try to keep it simple and short. Also, your domain name should be available on popular social networks, so take this into consideration before registration. Registering a couple of domains pointing at the same website is a common practice, so if you are not sure which one to choose, better register all of them, it will pay off in the long run.
Some of the hosting providers offer something called Domain privacy protection. Once you register a domain, your personal information is available on public databases like WHOIS. With domain privacy protection, your provider can use generic information instead and keep you hidden from spammers.
We all know that .com domains are the most desirable ones, but if your domain is already taken, don’t worry, since there are different kinds of domains that can suit your needs: .tech, .xyz, .site, .online, .space, .world, .biz and a lot more.
And remember: if you do your research, play it smart and work hard at the beginning, every next step along the way will be much easier.